By Neil Earle
Today we were asked to do one of those things pastors do more or less regularly. We were asked to do a memorial service for a small little boy. Only this little boy was very very small indeed – he was a fully formed two pounds but only lived for four or five minutes after being born, several months premature.
The young parents were of course devastated.
Their grief was obvious as was the grief of little Luke’s grandparents.
We gathered in a small, intimate upstairs room and had three passages of Scripture read by friends of the family. Psalm 139:7-16 were the words of the Psalmist expressing the thought that God had seen him in his mother’s womb. 2 Samuel 12:15-23 recorded David’s reactions when the child born to him and Bathsheba died after only a week. The point was that David expressed a dim hope of the future resurrection when he said “I will go to him, but he will not return to me” (verse 23) but I could not resist interjecting to the parents that David and Bathsheba had another child later. His name was Solomon.
The last reading was the famous “Rachel’s lament” from Jeremiah 31:15-17, 20 which expresses the feelings of bereaved mother’s everywhere and which was read at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. after the tragedy of 9/11.
These readings by members of our congregation who knew the bereaved family well set the stage for the New Testament portion of the brief service. “What the Old Testament only hints at, or sees vaguely or expresses plaintively is utterly different in the New Testament, “ I said. “With Jesus the lights really go on! The coming of Jesus electrified the First Testament’s passage about the resurrection hope. What was vague and subdued in the Old rockets into hyperspace in the New – resurrection hope. Brilliant, breathtaking and forever shiny new and even now stretching out ahead of us. All made possible because of the life, death, burial, resurrection AND ASCENSION of the one whom believers call the Lord Jesus Christ.”
I was eager to turn to my two texts but before that we had arranged to hear a CD rendition of Steve Green singing the haunting and powerful “We Believe.” You can check that out on youtube.com – just type in “Steve Green – We Believe.” It has become traditional for all our funeral services lately. It is the Apostles Creed set to music. It is so moving.
My two texts were, first, 2 Timothy 1:10 about Jesus Christ having “abolished death” and having brought “life and immortality to light.“ The second was Revelation 20:11-13 about “the small and dead” standing before God. It is a beautiful imaginative portrayal of the “dead small and great” standing before God at the end of time and being judged. In God’s scheme of things judgment doesn’t mean condemnation, and the clearly symbolic aspects of this passage are signaled by the “earth and heaven flying away.”
The White Throne Judgment teaches the ultimate fairness of God towards all those whose lives were cut short by untimely death. Jesus said to the people who spurned him in his day that the men of Nineveh and the men of Sodom would rise up in the judgment and condemn those who refused to hear him (Matthew 11:41). How much more does God make space for a tiny innocent baby named Luke?
But how did Jesus abolish death, some will ask?
Two ways.
First he rendered inoperative the dark power of death through his resurrection power. He freed us from the fear of judgment by taking our sins upon himself (Hebrews 2:14-15). The sting of death has been removed (1 Corinthians 15:53-58). Death is now “sleep” for the believer. Our bodies sleep in the grave awaiting the resurrection but our spirit returns to God to be perfected until it is reunited with a glorified body at the resurrection. Presbyterians have always known this.
Secondly, Jesus has abolished death by giving us New Life in Christ. When we were baptized and had hands laid on us (Acts 8) we received the impregnation of new life, new hope, death-conquering Faith inside us. By God’s grace we are saved by that Faith (Ephesians 3:8). That New Life inside us speaks to our spirits telling us that death is not the end, not the terrifying monster that holds us all in its grasp (Hebrews 2:14-15). Life after death means passing to a higher plane of existence – notice it in Revelation 6:9-11. Why else do we think the Bible writer Paul wrote so euphorically that “he would rather depart and be with the Lord” (Philippians 1:23).
God has a Plan. Transforming us from decaying human bodies into glorified spiritual bodies so that we shall be like Christ at His coming (1 John 3:2) – this represents a key move in that Plan. This is one reason Jesus is described as “the firstborn from the dead” (Colossians 1:18). The servant must be like his Master and so we too must taste death and live again to see its ultimate defeat.
That Plan includes the dead small and great. That Plan includes a little baby named Luke.