Sunday Morning Serenity

I've had cause, this week, to think about the end of life. Some of our family have been researching my Great-Aunt Effie, who died in 1919, when she was only 28. My friend Robin pointed out how interesting it is that a life so short, lived so long ago, still affects us today. My paternal grandmother, who lived into her nineties, used to say that life is very short, even if you live a really long time. The older I get, the truer that gets. Life is so precious. For all its calamaties, this earth is so beautiful and wonderful that I can't fathom leaving it, and it breaks my heart when someone I love has to go, sometimes far too soon. (When you love somebody, it can be "far too soon" even if they're in their nineties, like Granny.) But that's only because this is all I know. I can't imagine anything more wonderful because I haven't seen it. Yet.

I just finished the Gospel of Mark, and I never noticed this before, but the answers to some of our own tough questions got recorded, thanks to religious leaders who were trying to prove Jesus wasn't the Son of God. They were hurling what they thought were unanswerable questions at him, but he answered them all—and, in the process, answers us. According to the law of Moses, if a man dies with no children, his brother must marry the widow and produce children so that the widow will be cared for and the family line will continue. The Sadducees had put together a riddle of sorts, about a woman who marries a man with seven brothers. Her husband dies before she has children. One by one, each brother marries the widow and dies, but she never has children with any of them, and she eventually dies herself. The question for Jesus was, "At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?"

Jesus replied, "Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage;
they will be like the angels in heaven.

Now about the dead rising—have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush, how God said to him, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'?
He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.
You are badly mistaken!" Mark 12:24-27

When I'm confronted with a life cut short, like Aunt Effie's, when I catch myself thinking "it's just not fair that they don't get to live any longer—or that all of us have to die," I'm going to try and hold onto what Jesus said: He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.You are badly mistaken!

Comments

[candace hicks]

Thank You :)