resurrection

Address at the Interment of the Mortal Remains of Caroline Jackson, 5 August 2026 (St Oswald’s Day)

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Preached at St Oswald’s, Widford

Psalm 121; 1 Corinthians 15.50–58

“Therefore, my beloved brethren … know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”

Interior of a small stone chapel looking east from the west end towards the chancel arch. Whitewashed walls tinged pink, an open roof of dark timber rafters with white plaster between. Two painted boards in decorated frames flank the pointed chancel arch, lettered with the Ten Commandments; traces of medieval wall painting survive around the deep-set leaded window on the left, where a vase of garden flowers stands on the sill. Box pews of pale, weathered oak fill the nave on both sides, with a dark carved wooden pulpit or reading desk to the left of the arch. Beyond, a small altar with two candles and a cross stands below a traceried east window. The floor is worn stone flags. In the foreground right, a book ledge holds stacked red hymnals and blue books, with laminated notices propped above.
St Oswald’s Widford © Gerry Lynch, 5 August 2026

The life of St Oswald, on whose feast day we gather in this church dedicated to him, might easily be accounted a failure. He ruled Northumbria for nine years, before dying in battle aged just thirty-eight in the incessant wars between Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and Picts, themselves multiply factionalised, that disfigured these islands in the 7th Century. Providence decreed him a more important role than might be supposed from those bare facts – after his father’s death in war, he had spent his childhood in exile in the Kingdom of Dál Riata, home to the great monastery of Iona. In exile, he converted to Christianity, and full of fervour on his return to Northumbria, he granted the island of Lindisfarne to Bishop Aidan as the site of another monastery. That Holy Island had such a significant impact on Church history that Oswald’s cult spread deep into continental Europe. As far away as Slovenia, the town of Ožbalt is named for him.

The great Bard was wrong. The good that men do is often not interred with their bones – indeed, seeds sown in our earthly lives are often only ready to be harvested long after our deaths. We all admire the person who plants trees that will only reach maturity in the time of their great-grandchildren.

It is in that light that we should look at Caroline’s political career. She joined the Secretariat of the Conservative Group in the European Parliament in 1974, before being elected herself a decade later, serving in the European Parliament until 2009. For more than a third of a century, she served the British people and those of the whole continent, during a period of extraordinary change which saw the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Iron Curtain, the European Economic Community’s transformation into the European Union, and its expansion firstly to the newly democratic states of southern Europe, and then to the formerly Communist East – to Ožbalt in Slovenia, and well beyond.

Caroline developed significant expertise in environmental and public health matters, and was one of those British MEPs who made a serious contribution not only to the detailed legislative work of the European Parliament but to the construction of Europe – work of which she was immensely proud.

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Risen, Not Restored – Sermon Preached on 17th May 2026 (Sunday After Ascension)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne, Holy Cross, Seend, and St Peter’s, Poulshot

Acts 1.6-14, John 17. 1-11

“Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” 

The upper portion of Graham Sutherland's enormous tapestry at Coventry Cathedral, photographed looking upward. Christ sits enthroned at the centre within a pointed mandorla outlined in gold, wearing a pale white robe. His face is angular and gaunt in Sutherland's distinctive modernist style, with dark features rendered in bold, almost sketched lines. Both hands are raised, the right in a gesture of blessing. The background is a striking vivid green, woven in broad, uneven brushstroke-like bands. Flanking Christ on either side, set within smaller rectangular panels, are two of the four living creatures representing the evangelists — stylised, energetic figures with wings and haloes, depicted in earthy tones against darker backgrounds. Fine vertical lines from the tapestry's warp threads are visible across the surface, emphasising the monumental textile's handwoven character.
The upper parts of Graham Sutherland’s great east wall tapestry in Coventry Cathedral © Gerry Lynch, 2 August 2018.

You don’t have a clue what’s going to happen next, do you? You’ve been listening to Jesus’ teachings for years, but you still haven’t worked out what He is actually about because you’re too busy trying to fit Him into your half-baked notions about God.

No, no – not you. It’s the apostles I’m talking about, and them asking Jesus at the Ascension if He was going to restore Israel’s power.

They’ve been through it all with Him – the incidents with the crowds and the Pharisees, His horrific death, then the bewildering joy of finding Him raised to life again afterwards; they’ve been eating meals with Him and going off into wild places and onto boats with Him for literally years — and they still don’t really know what Jesus is about. They think He’s going to bring the good old days back, except better; that He’s going to seize political power, and make Jerusalem the capital of an independent Jewish state again, and make it so fair and just that foreigners will flock from all directions to see this godly state in action. And, of course, they assume that when Jesus becomes king, they’re going to be powerful people in this new state. In other words, the world is going to be a better place – and they’ll be living on easy street while it happens.

But perhaps they needed to be paying more attention to Jesus’ nature when He returned to them after the Resurrection, because He wasn’t restored to His old life. Instead, Jesus has mysterious physical characteristics in the Resurrection accounts: He can eat, and Thomas can poke His finger right into His wounds; but at the same time, He can appear in the middle of locked rooms and remain unrecognised until He breaks bread. Jesus has entered some sort of new life.

And from our perspective, we do know what happened next. We know Jesus didn’t bring the glory days back. Instead, through that tiny group of followers who remained with Him at His Ascension, He built a kingdom that is more enduring and more important than any earthly kingdom. But there was much pain and struggle on the way.

That theme of pain and struggle leading to the new kingdom is also a strong one in today’s Gospel reading. Sharing a Last Supper with His very closest friends on the night before He died, Jesus prayed that our heavenly Father would glorify Him.

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We All Need Doubt: Sermon Preached on 12th April 2026 (Second Sunday of Easter)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

1 Peter 1. 3-9; John 20. 19-31

“Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.’”

A dimly lit scene showing four men in close proximity, their faces and hands dramatically illuminated against a dark background. One man, bare-chested with his robe pulled aside to reveal a wound in his right side, guides the hand of a second man whose index finger is extended and appears to be probing the wound. The second man leans forward intently, his face close to the wound, brow furrowed in concentration. Two further men press in from behind, peering over the shoulders of the first two, their expressions conveying intense curiosity. The lighting falls sharply from the upper left, casting deep shadows and emphasising the physical, tactile nature of the moment. The figures fill the picture space almost entirely, with very little background visible.
Caravaggio, The Incredulity of St Thomas (1602). Hangs in the Sanssouci Picture Gallery, Potsdam.

Do you blame Thomas for doubting that his friends had really seen Jesus risen from the dead? I don’t know about you, but if any of my friends want me to believe something that seems pretty far-fetched, I expect them to have some actual evidence for me, ideally hard physical evidence. If they can’t supply that, I’d expect there to be some evidence that whatever far-fetched thing they wanted me to believe had had some impact on them.

Now, the idea of one of your mates not only rising from the dead, but walking through walls and appearing in a locked room, is about as far-fetched as it gets. So the fact that the apostles were still hiding in the upper room, full of fear, would have left me pretty unconvinced too. He gets dismissed as “Doubting Thomas” when he is only engaging in the sort of healthy scepticism we should all practice at times.

And, actually, when we think about it, is it always a bad thing to be a doubter? All groups of people need different temperaments and personalities. An organisation or institution without doubters is going to see all sorts of poor practices, dishonesty and abuse going on, unchallenged and perpetuated. The term for a church without doubters is a cult. I wouldn’t be without the doubters in the various churches I’ve worked and worshipped in over the years. Of course, an organisation with too many doubters is also an unhealthy place, and is probably in the process of losing faith in itself – indeed, something very much like that happened to the Church in the latter part of the 20th Century. There is, I think, a natural ecology to these things.

What Thomas wanted was some hard physical evidence that Jesus had risen from the dead – and he got it. Christianity is a very physical faith. We’ll see that in a few minutes’ time, when we baptise little Ivan: the water is essential for baptism. There is no valid baptism without it. We couldn’t baptise for periods during the worst of Covid because we weren’t allowed to be physically present together. It wouldn’t have been valid to pretend to baptise someone down a Zoom link. For the same reason, we also couldn’t carry out ordinations during Covid – the bishop actually needs to lay hands on the person they are ordaining, in a link of physical touch that goes all the way back to Thomas and the other apostles. As a result of that, my ordination as a deacon was delayed by three months, which seemed like a big deal at the time.

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The Gospel I Don’t Like: Sermon Preached on 5th April 2026 (Easter Day)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne, Christ Church, Worton, and Holy Cross, Seend

Colossians 3. 1-4; Matthew 28. 1-10

“So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.”

A large, densely populated painting set in an English churchyard. Figures in various states of undress emerge from tombs and from between pale stone grave markers, some stretching, some clambering upright, others still dazed. The scene is crowded and unhurried rather than dramatic — people appear bemused, curious, or quietly absorbed. A woman in dark robes kneels among flowers in the foreground. A robed figure reads from a scroll near the centre. Angels and armoured figures stand among the risen dead. The church itself is visible in the background, bright white. Flowers — daisies, lilies — grow abundantly across the grass. The overall mood is strange and domestic rather than triumphant, as if resurrection were an ordinary if unexpected event occurring on a quiet English summer morning.
Stanley Spencer, A Cookham Resurrection (1924-7) – in the ownership of the Tate Modern, London, but not currently on display.

Let me start with a confession. The account of the Resurrection we heard this morning comes from Matthew’s Gospel. I don’t like it. It doesn’t persuade me. In fact, it annoys me. It feels too tidy compared with the other three Gospels.

When the two Marys go to the tomb at dawn, there’s none of the doubt or fear we see in the other Gospels. Instead, an angel descends, rolls away the stone, the guards collapse in terror, and everything falls into place rather conveniently. The women don’t run out screaming into the dawn, like they do in Mark’s Gospel; Mary Magdalene doesn’t mistake Jesus for the gardener, like she does in John’s Gospel; the men don’t think the story is just the sort of idle tale you’d expect from women, like they do in Luke’s Gospel.

Matthew’s Gospel ties down the detail of Jesus’ Resurrection and smooths the rough edges. And that’s the problem, because for me rough edges are the signs of something real.

And should we worry that there are four slightly different accounts of Jesus’ Resurrection? Well, if there’s a controversial penalty in a football match, or a controversial try in a rugby match, do four fans ever agree on what actually happened and what the ref should have decided? Even though these days everything gets filmed from a dozen angles and sent up to the video ref?

So, if the Gospels are genuinely describing what the women and the apostles experienced on that first Easter Day, I wouldn’t expect them to be too consistent. These accounts were written about thirty and sixty years later. They’re the product of old men making sure that the events they had experienced first-hand when they were young men, and which had changed their lives, got written down before they die.

But one detail that all the Gospel accounts agree on is that it was women who were the first witnesses to the Resurrection. Now, women weren’t treated as the most reliable witnesses in courts in the ancient world. Certainly they were seen as less rational and reliable than men, especially free male citizens. And while a high-status Roman matron might have been considered fairly credible, ordinary country women from backwoods places like Galilee certain weren’t—still less somebody like Mary Magdalene whose being “healed of seven demons” hints at a history of mental illness, and who probably wouldn’t be considered all that reliable a witness even today.

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Stinking Lazarus and Dry Bones: Sermon Preached on 22nd March 2026 (Passion Sunday)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington

Ezekiel 37. 1-14, John 11. 1-45

“Lord, by this time he stinketh”

Against a deep blue sky, Jesus stands on the left, his right hand raised in command, a golden halo around his head. A crowd of disciples and mourners press close behind him, their faces expressing astonishment and distress. In the centre foreground, Mary Magdalene kneels prostrate at Jesus's feet. To the right, Lazarus stands upright before the entrance to a rock-cut tomb, his body still wrapped in white grave cloths, his face exposed. Two haloed women — Martha and Mary — stand near him. A small figure at the far right holds his nose against the stench. The composition draws the eye from Christ's commanding gesture across to the risen Lazarus.
Giotto, The Raising of Lazarus (1304-6). a fresco from the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

Compared with our other senses, there is something particularly potent and unavoidable about smell. You can close your eyes, you can stick your fingers in your ears, but if something around you stinks, there isn’t a lot you can do to stop noticing it while you’re breathing. And the neurologists tell us something else—they tell us that unlike our other senses, smell doesn’t pass through our thalamus, which is the brain’s central relay unit, but instead goes straight to the parts of our brain which control memory, and which control emotion. It’s why particular smells can so easily trigger memories from our earliest years, and why they can also trigger such powerful emotions.

Smell can trigger disgust in us like nothing else can. I hope that none of you have ever smelt an untreated human body after a few days but I’m sure that, like me, you’ve at times come across big animals like badgers or even livestock in that sort of state. This is one of two cases in today’s readings where the King James Version is definitely superior to the NRSV: “there is a stench” isn’t half as memorable as “he stinketh”!

Lazarus stinks because he’s been dead for four days. That’s more important than it might seem on a casual reading. There was an old Jewish tradition that the soul hovered near the body for three days, hoping to re-enter it, and then departed when it saw the face beginning to change with decomposition.

So one thing St John wants you to know here is that Lazarus was totally stone-dead: not out cold, not in a coma, not in the exit lounge, not dead for a day at most like the resurrection miracles in the other Gospels—but absolutely brown bread. So this isn’t a case of Jesus merely healing someone; this is showing Jesus as the Lord of death and life itself, someone who can bring Lazarus’ soul back from the netherworld. This is showing that Jesus is God.

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Why Are You Here?: Sermon Preached on 9nd November 2025 (Third Sunday Before Advent)

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A panoramic 19th-century Romantic landscape painting of a misty alpine lake with cascading waterfalls plunging from rocky cliffs into turquoise waters, flanked by autumnal golden-orange forests, dark cypress groves, distant snow-capped mountains, and a flock of white swans gliding on the surface under a hazy blue sky.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

2 Thessalonians 2.1–5, 13–17; Luke 20.27–38

“God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation…to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

A vibrant early-20th-century watercolor of Jesus conversing with a Sadducee in a sunlit ancient Middle Eastern street. Central: Jesus, with long brown hair, beard, and compassionate gaze, in white robes, gesturing explanatorily. Facing him: An elderly Sadducee in striped robe and green-white turban, hand on chin thoughtfully. Around them: A dozen bearded men in earth-toned robes and headscarves, observing curiously. Background: Ochre stucco buildings, arches, blue sky. Rich golds, blues, earth tones; soft shading, detailed fabrics.
‘The Question of the Pharisees’ from Harold Copping’s ‘Scenes from the Bible’ (before 1907).

Why are you here?

Is it because you want to receive Communion? Good reason. Is it because you slept in this morning? Because you love the ambience in St Mary’s on a winter evening? Because it’s more interesting than yet another repeat of an old episode of Antiques Roadshow?

As long as worshipping God in His Son Jesus Christ is at least one of your reasons for being here, then St Paul has a different and more fundamental answer as to why you’re here. He writes to the Christians in Thessalonica, then as now a large Greek city, that “God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation…to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

So you are here tonight because God called you to be here, so you might obtain glory: glory in the world to come, when you are raised from the dead in Christ, as Christ was Himself raised from the dead by the Father.

The idea of Resurrection strikes many people as silly, and often they think that’s because they’re sophisticated modern people who believe in science. But actually, Resurrection struck a lot of people in the ancient world as silly too—this includes the people mentioned in our Gospel reading, the Sadducees, who were a group of Jewish religious leaders who seem to have done a lot of the administrative work in the Temple at Jerusalem in Jesus’ time.

We don’t know a lot about the Sadducees, and most of what we do know was written by their enemies so isn’t entirely reliable. But we can be pretty sure about a few things. They were good administrators, and at their best they were very learned. They were drawn from the upper échelons of Jewish society in the Holy Land, enjoyed the good things in life and had no worries about spending money on luxuries. And they didn’t believe in Heaven, Hell, spirits, angels, or demons—any more than they believed in the Resurrection.

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Happy to See Me Dead?: (Sixth Sunday of Easter: 25th May 2025)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Acts 16. 9-15; John 14. 23-29

“I do not give to you as the world gives.”

Will you be happy when I die?

A terracotta bust of a figure with one arm raised, hand resting on the head, and long black hair flowing down the back. The sculpture has a weathered, earthy texture and is set against a black background.
Mourner, suspected to represent Isis mourning Osiris. 18th dynasty, 1550–1295 BC. Now in the Louvre, Paris.

Often when I take a funeral, people tell me they want it to be a celebration. But I always reply that I hope that people won’t be too happy at my funeral.

The summer I finished university, twenty-five years ago, I went on a post-graduation trip to Turkey and Georgia – Georgia the country in the Caucasus, not the American state. One of my abiding memories of that trip is being invited to a wake, which in Georgia involves a full day of banqueting—and drinking. As the coffin was carried off from the house, Chopin’s Funeral March was played on old record player as a black and white portrait photograph of the deceased in younger days, resplendent in his Red Army dress uniform, was processed in front of the coffin. Most incredibly, professional mourners, all of them older women dressed in black, wailed at the top of their voices and pulled clumps of hair from their heads.

I don’t think I want people to go that far at my funeral, but I hope they’ll be at least a little bit sad that I’m gone.

According to this morning’s Gospel reading, that might make me a bad Christian. The reading comes from a speech Jesus made to his closest followers on the night before He died, and He uses a strange phrase “If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father”.

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The Last Enemy to Be Destroyed Is Death (Easter Day: 20th April 2025)

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The scene is set at dusk with a starry sky. Two cloaked figures on the left, one holding a lantern, approach a rocky tomb. A radiant angelic figure in white with a halo stands near the tomb's entrance, emitting a soft glow. The background features a dark, hilly landscape, creating a mystical and serene atmosphere.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne, St Peter’s, Poulshot, and Holy Cross, Seend

Readings – 1 Corinthians 15. 19-26; Luke 24. 1-12         

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

A painting depicting three figures in biblical attire near an empty tomb. The figure on the left, draped in orange and gray robes, holds a jar and appears mournful. The central figure wears a blue cloak over a red dress, standing with a somber expression. The figure on the right, in a red cloak and green dress, holds a white cloth and looks contemplative. The background features a hilly landscape with sparse trees, a cloudy sky, and distant structures, evoking a quiet, reflective mood.
Sketch to the Painting ‘Three Marys Walking to Christ’s Tomb’, Józef Simmler (1864), National Museum, Kraków.

Christians in this country are lucky that the celebration of Easter comes when springtime’s miracle of new life is at its peak. The miraculous nature of new life is clear whenever we see it, from an April field full of cowslips and celandine to a new-born child sleeping in the arms of its mother. The very existence of life is a mystery, and our existence, as a species that can reason and has a sense of right and wrong, is stranger still. There are two explanations for of human existence. One is that we are the product of the spontaneous emergence of life from non-living chemicals, and then trillions of chance encounters over four billion years—that we are a freak occurrence in a meaningless, and largely lifeless, universe. The other is that we were created by something greater than ourselves.

Our first instinct is probably that the only explanation compatible with science is that the human race came about by chance. The universe is a huge place and the four billion year span of life on Earth is a very long time indeed… far too long for us really to get our heads around. You can also be a perfectly good and faithful Christian and believe that God used the natural processes of the universe to allow a species in His image and likeness to evolveand, that, given the sheer size of the universe and the depth of time involved, nothing else would be required.

For a long time that was precisely my position. There is no scientific evidence for God nor, I believed, could or should Christians waste their time trying to find evidence for something that is fundamentally a matter of faith. But do you remember that old saying that if you had enough monkeys hammering randomly at typewriters for long enough, that one of them would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare?

Well, the maths on that have been done repeatedly, and if you had enough monkeys to fill not just the world, but the entire observable universe, and let them type for the whole time until the protons that make up all matter began to decay, then the chance that one of them would produce Hamlet is so low that we don’t even have a name for the number. It’s not one in a billion or one in a trillion, but one in one followed by hundreds of thousands of noughts. If it is improbable that a play named Hamlet could emerge by change, how much less probable it is that a man named Shakespeare could do so?

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A Faith for this World?: Sermon Preached on 16th February 2025 (Third Sunday before Lent)

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The image depicts a vast, undulating farmland under a clear sky during golden hour. Rows of crops stretch across the landscape, their textures highlighted by warm sunlight. In the distance, gentle hills complete this serene rural scene.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – 1 Corinthians 15. 12-20; Luke 6. 17-26

“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Is your hope only for this world rather than what might be in the life to come? Is your faith in vain?

A painting depicting a scene by a body of water with a mountainous background. In the foreground, a large group of people, dressed in robes and head coverings, are gathered around a central figure who is seated on a rock. This central figure is also robed in white and appears to be teaching or speaking to the crowd. The people are seated on the ground, some standing, all attentively listening. The setting suggests a historical or biblical scene, with the atmosphere being calm and serene.
James Tissot, Jesus Teaches People by the Sea (1886-96), hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.

I always feel a little uncomfortable as an inclusive, liberal-minded, sort of priest in putting Paul’s case as bluntly as that. I realise many people do support the Church for what it does in this world, and many folk are loyal churchpeople and seek to be faithful to Christ as He taught us to live in this world, while not really believing in “the magic bits”. The Beatitudes, which are today’s Gospel reading, are often presented as a manifesto of hope for the future of humanity—if we could only fully embrace them and the rest of Christ’s teachings, really fully embrace them, we could create heaven on earth. Or so some say.

All of you welcome here, just as you are. That’s an important principle for a parish church that seeks to be a centre of faith and hope for the whole community; also I’ve had enough people tell me over the years I’m not a real Christian for me to tell anybody else the same thing. For what it’s worth I think that, on balance, over time, Christianity is good for earthly societies and Jesus Christ’s teachings, on those occasions when we really do live them out fully, do create little pockets of heaven here on Earth.

But I’m going to tell you why I believe in “the magic bits” and why I agree with Paul that if our faith is only for this world then we are to be pitied.

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Bread of Eternal Life: Sermon Preached on 18th August 2024 (Twelfth Sunday After Trinity)

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The hands of a priest saying Mass, near a paten with a wafer host, with a chalice and purificator on one side and a Mass book on a stand on the other.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Ephesians 5. 15-20; John 6. 51-58

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life…”

Funerals, and ministry with the bereaved and dying, are a big part of my job. Some people seem to think they need to sympathise with me for this. If people ask me what I’ve been doing in work, and I say I’ve taken a funeral, or spent time with someone who is terminally ill, they’ll often say, “I am sorry…”, or “How sad for you.”

A brightly coloured, early 14th Century, breviary illustration of Jesus, in blue robes and with a halo, observing many full baskets of bread being carried by the people around him, while the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove hovers over the scene.
The Feeding of the 5000, from the Breviary known as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, executed ca. 1411-16.

This is less the case among churchgoers, I’ll grant you. It more often happens in the pub, or when I’m sitting outside Caffé Nero in Devizes smoking my pipe. Among those who actually practice the Christian faith, people are more likely to accept that death, while a cause of great pain to at least some of those left behind, is also the gateway to something else.

One of the great privileges of priesthood is to minister to someone who is going to their death in absolute confidence in the promises of Christ. There are times in every clergyperson’s life when they know they are being ministered to and fed by their flock, and not the other way around—and a situation like this is one of them. In a strange way these are times when one learns that a belief in eternal life is worth it for what it brings to this life alone; that even if it weren’t true then it would still be one of the most valuable gifts one could have. But this sense of rightness and peace with ourselves and with the cosmos that faith in eternal life brings is itself a sign that it is true—that this is the reality that God made us for.

Now, obviously some people think this eternal life business is rank nonsense: pie in the sky when you die and all that. But it was ever thus. That’s a big part of what’s going on in this morning’s Gospel reading. I preached about this a fortnight ago in this church, because we’re having readings from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel five weeks in a row. We could briefly summarise the story of John 6 like this: the people think Jesus is great when he’s performing miracles, but once he starts telling them that He’s bread come down from heaven that gives eternal life, they start muttering about how weird it all is and eventually turn on Him. And it isn’t just members of the general public who turn on Jesus in the end, but even some of His closest followers.

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