Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington
Readings – Isaiah 52.7–10; Luke 24.13–31
Sometimes, we don’t see things as they truly are until someone does something that draws our attention to them. In the famous story set on the Road to Emmaus, two followers of Jesus, fleeing Jerusalem after His execution, don’t recognise Him until He breaks bread with them. Then their eyes are opened and they know that He has been raised from the dead.
The world of the 2020s does much to distract us from the spiritual side of our nature. The screens that now follow us everywhere, bringing us unlimited opportunities for entertainment and amusement, mean that we scarcely have a moment to draw breath and contemplate our ultimate destiny. Along with that, those who hold a very narrow view of science tell us that there is nothing more to us than flesh and blood. Emotions, thoughts, and choices, in this view, are nothing more than products of chemicals and electrical signals bouncing around our bodies.
Yet something in us rebels against the idea that we are just walking bags of chemicals controlled by the computer made of meat in our skulls. Instinctively, we know that we are creatures of soul as well as body. Every human culture creates elaborate ceremonies and objects to remember its dead. This is something that distinguishes humans from animals. Something in us knows that death is not the end.
We also know that a universe without judgement is a universe without justice. Stalin and Chairman Mao died in their own beds as free men at a ripe old age, and so did Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith. If God is just, and Christians have always said that He is, then He must hold those who have got away with wrongdoing in their earthly lives to account. Christians have also always said that God knows and sees all.
And that can worry us, because while we know we’re not like that, all of us can think of things we’ve done or said in our lives that were seriously wrong – not mere slips or errors of judgement, but moments of pure anger, or greed, or hate, when we’ve intentionally set out to do wrong and got away with it. Often the worst wrongs are done to the people we love the most. More than that, the people we love aren’t perfect either. We love people in their imperfections and are loved by them in ours. Should we fear judgement for ourselves, and for those we love?
God exists beyond time – indeed, God is the creator and ruler of time. When we die, we enter a reality beyond the limitations of time as we experience it in this universe. So we can pray in hope for the souls of those we love and have lost, and the Feast of All Souls is the day when the Church particularly does so.
There are different reasons and purposes for prayer – one is simply to remember: re-membering someone means putting them together again in our minds, limb by limb; it means treasuring their souls still in our hearts.
There are other reasons to pray for the dead. We might pray that they can still forgive us the wrong we have done to them. We might pray that God will forgive them the wrong we know that they have done us and others.
Our first reading tonight was a very short passage from the prophecy of Isaiah, which was written about five hundred and fifty years before Christ. It was as far away from Jesus’ time as all those King Henrys are from ours. The first Christians saw in it a promise reaching across all those centuries to the coming of Jesus, and how He would bring salvation to people of every nation and language and race on Earth.
We pray for the dead knowing that the Jesus Christ who will be their judge and ours is the same Jesus Christ who came into the world and died on the Cross to save us, not because we have passed some test, but because Christ loves us in all our imperfections. And if we can love and forgive those whom we treasured on this earth, then we can pray in confidence that God’s capacity to love and forgive is much greater than ours.
The two pilgrims on the Road to Emmaus weren’t perfect followers of Jesus – they were running away when He stopped to share a meal with them and so revealed the true nature of things. May He hold those whom we loved on this earth close to Him for all eternity; and may He also reveal something of Himself to each of us here this evening, so that we might live without fearing our own deaths.
And now to God be the glory: the Father the creator of all life; the Son the restorer to new life; the Spirit who breathes in all life; now and forever, as is most justly His due. Amen.