Moderator, Dr David Bruce, offers a reflection for Easter.
P
erhaps this is a provocative title for a Herald article about Easter – but the alternative is if anything, even more startling. “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” We say these words easily when reciting the Apostle’s Creed, but like much which is important in Christian theology there have been multiple, sometimes mischievous interpretations of it. So let me state it clearly. I believe in both the death of the body and the resurrection of the body. Death is horrid. Our family experienced a tragic and unexpected bereavement on New Year’s Eve 2021. Death came like a chill wind through our house, settled in every room, infected every conversation and left us stunned. It has taken months to recover, and the journey is not over. People have been very kind – sending words of comfort and offering practical support. How grateful we have been for these expressions of love. But this awful personal loss has forced us to ask some questions. What is it that we actually believe about death? Are these beliefs fanciful, or well grounded? What ought we to say at funeral services? Is death so insignificant a thing that we can comfort ourselves by dismissing its brutal force, taming it and even making it our friend? “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened.
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Herald April 2022
Everything remains exactly as it was…. What is this death but a negligible accident? …I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner…” These words are often quoted at funerals today – presumably in an attempt to shrink the impossible scale of what has happened to manageable proportions. But what these words offer is empty of hope. They are quoted from a sermon preached by Canon Henry Scott Holland in St Paul’s Cathedral following the death of King Edward VII in 1910, but are almost universally misunderstood. Canon Scott Holland makes this reference to expose the futility of such thinking about death, not to celebrate it. He goes on in his sermon to explain the Christian hope, based not on an empty notion of death as a convivial or trivial thing which needs no remedy other than the passage of time until we are all joyfully reunited. Instead he rightly describes death as a dark enemy, the
Death un-does us. Resurrection re-creates us. It is the sure guarantee that in Christ who defeated death, we may be re-made.
final obscenity: “…the cruel ambush into which we are snared [making] its horrible breach in our gladness with careless and inhuman disregard of us.” This latter sentence describes my New Year’s Eve experience. This I can identify with. Into this awfulness, the truth of the statement “I believe in the resurrection of the body” begins to gain some traction. Death un-does us. Resurrection recreates us. It is the sure guarantee that in Christ who defeated death, we may be re-made. The Westminster Confession of Faith upon which Presbyterians rely as an explanation of the most important teachings of the Bible, says that although our bodies return to dust when we die, our souls “immediately return to God who gave them” (Confession, Chapter 32). Having returned to God, believers: “behold the face of God in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies.” This is important, because it points forward in time to an as-yet unfulfilled promise of God. The Confession goes on to explain: “At the last day, such as are found alive shall not die, but be changed; and all the dead shall be raised up with the self-same bodies…which shall be united with their souls forever.” This two-step understanding of what happens to us after death is not a version of purgatory, but a clear celebration that our ultimate destiny with God is a
