Dead End?

The dark days of Good Friday and Easter Saturday are over.  It all changes on Easter Sunday.

Of course, the difficult situation you're dealing with may not have changed yet.  But on Easter Sunday we see a ray of hope - a promise of resurrection.  On Easter Sunday Christians celebrate the amazing fact that when the women went to the tomb two days after Jesus' death, they found it empty. 

I'd like to share with you another great piece of art from the clever folks that brought us www.icons-on-sea.org.uk  .  This can be viewed in person at the end of Southend pier:

 

We see a bunch of flowers taped to a traffic sign, a poignant reminder that someone died there, perhaps not long ago.  They're taped to a 'dead end' sign, which seems to indicate the sad fact that the person commemorated by the flowers has reached a dead end.  But the empty tomb of Easter Sunday shows us that the grave is not the dead end it once was - that there is a way through.

 

The biblical writers tell us, not that Jesus' death was reversed; not that his spirit survived though his body was dead; but that he had come through death and out the other side.  He had a real, physical body (albeit one that could walk through walls) - he touched people, he ate food.  And yet he still bore the scars on his hands, feet and side that had been made at his crucifixion.  Death, he showed his followers, was not the end for me, and it will not be the end for you.

 

The Christian hope is not that God will send us somewhere nice when our spirit outlives our body, but instead that after we have died, body, mind and spirit, God will raise us from death, as he raised Jesus.  In John 11.25-26 we read: Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying.  Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die."  Not even death can separate us from the love of God.