[This is one in a series of devotional reflections prepared for Horley Baptist Church during July 2021]
It was a cold November day, there was no shelter from the bitter wind blowing across the hillside as we stood around the coffin of our friend. How calm he looked, in a second-hand suit that was probably better than anything he had worn during his lifetime, his beard shaved and with a haircut that owed more to the mortician than any hairdresser.
Where was his joie de vivre – his enthusiasm for life? Where was his positive attitude, his willingness to get stuck in, to carry the heaviest sacks, to move the biggest boxes; the one who could be counted on whenever a helping hand was needed? All gone.
This man for whom risk represented an opportunity rather than a deterrent, did he make one final mistake? He had been helping to milk some cows – did he upset the cow, did he touch something that he shouldn’t have touched, was the equipment defective? Who knows but in an instant he was gone.
He was of no fixed abode; this man who was willing to help everywhere belonged nowhere – his last resting place in a remote corner of a distant graveyard was begged for him and the committal was performed as a favour. No eulogy, no epitaph, just a simple hand-written wooden cross bearing his name.
Such is the cycle of life and death. A time to be born, a time to die; a time to celebrate, a time to mourn. In the natural world too, summer and winter, springtime and harvest continue apparently ad-infinitum.
♰
We are reminded of another hillside, with a small group of people gathered to witness the departure of their friend. A man of the same age as our friend, he too was placed in a tomb which had been negotiated for him. But this man’s death was not accidental; it had been planned from before the beginning of time.
You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.
[Romans 5 v 6]
Christ’s death opened the way for sinners to be reconciled with God.
But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
[Romans 5 v 8]
Nor was Christ’s death the end of the matter; his return will put an end to this perpetual sequence of life and death. There will be a new heaven and a new earth – are you ready?
There is a green hill far away, outside a city wall,
where the dear Lord was crucified, who died to save us all.He died that we might be forgiv’n, he died to make us good,
that we might go at last to heav’n, saved by his precious blood.
[CF Alexander, 1848]
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