“I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.” --John 10:28
I don’t think I fully appreciated my own mortality until my senior year of High School. Sure, I knew, intellectually, that one day I would die. But, like most seventeen-year-olds, I figured that was a long, long way off. But then, one of my peers died. He was in the class after mine. He was driving home from out of town late one night when his car left the road and crashed. We weren’t close friends, though I knew him and we talked from time to time. We had talked just a few days before he died. I remember how hard it was to get my head around the fact that he was gone. That death had claimed someone my age. That my youth did not exempt me from dying. His death forty years ago had a huge impact on me, and I still think about him from time to time.
Today, in the light of school shootings, kids being gunned down in the streets of our cities and the pervasive reality of violence in our world, the fact that the reality of my mortality didn’t sink in until I was seventeen almost seems quaint. On the other hand, Americans seem bent on doing everything we can to defy life’s ultimate reality, and to push death back back as much as possible. But, the truth is, death is coming for all of us, and it is no respecter of age, economic status, privilege, power or place. Our inevitable mortality is a problem that we, on our own, cannot fix.
Jesus’ promise of eternal life stands out in bold relief against the backdrop of this cold reality. It almost seems too good to be true. And, for some, it is. But for those who believe it, it has the power to change our whole way of looking at, and living our lives. Knowing that, though we will all die, death will not have the last word can give us a bold confidence to be who God created us to be, and the courage to face our mortality head on, not avoid, defy or deny it. But, even more, knowing that, through Christ, our lives have been given to us, allows us to live with gratitude and thankfulness for how ever many days we have been given. Knowing that our futures are secure and that no one and no thing can snatch us from God’s hand means we don’t have to live fighting for our own survival all the time. It frees us to live, not for ourselves, but for the sake of sharing the life we have been given with one another and for joining hands and fighting the pervasive reality of death together.
Eternal life is an amazing gift not just for some point down the road, but right here, right now.
This doesn’t mean that Jesus’ sheep don’t have struggles, get sick, suffer and die. We do. It just means that we know that we never have to face the valley of the shadow of death alone and that there is always, always life waiting on the other side. That’s the hope of the Resurrection. That’s the hope of Easter.
Peace,
Bishop Mike
Thanks for reading.
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