June 2018
A few of my words
from the funeral of my mother-in-law,
Daphne Murnane, who died on 29th April having lived for the last 4½
years in Holme and then Burton.
“What happens when I die?”
Google street-view can tell you what it would be like to walk down a
street on the other side of the world but who can tell you what it will be like
to travel the very short distance from life to death?
Try answering this question first: “What happened when Jesus died?” On that night, after a last meal with his
disciples, Jesus told them not to be troubled; he was going to his Father’s
house to prepare a place for them. Do we
imagine Jesus like a ghostly hotel-keeper cleaning the rooms and making the
beds in his heavenly Father’s house? That’s
not what Jesus means. He does not get a
place ready by what he does after death but by the way that he
dies.
God’s Son will die in the place of others, taking on himself
the punishment that they deserve for their hard-hearted stubbornness towards
him and his Father and all the foolishness and wickedness that flows from that. Going first to the cross, he will open the
way to his Father for others. Jesus
doesn’t show them the way or tell them about the way. The way to the Father is not a map or a set
of directions, but a person. Jesus says,
“I am the way … no-one comes to the Father except through me.”
To move the Space Shuttle between different NASA sites they
strapped it to the top of a 747. If you
want to go to the place where Jesus has gone then you need to be strapped to
him: depending on his cross for your rescue, living with him as your boss.
On the morning of Daphne’s operation she was reading Psalm
31 where David
cries out, “Into
your hands I commit my spirit; redeem me, O LORD.” Years later Jesus spoke those
same words from the cross. And they were
in Daphne’s mind in the last week of her life because without arrogance she
could say with confidence, “Where Jesus has gone, I – by his grace and kindness
– will surely follow.”
Sincerely
Graham Burrows