By: Jim Taylor

Sources of reassurance

We’ve just come through Easter. Churches echoed with triumphant hymns like “Jesus Christ is risen today.”

        We don’t spend much time on the cross.

        Writers, musicians, artists – all try to get readers, listeners, and viewers to share Hamlet’s indecision, Beethoven’s indomitable spirit, the Mona Lisa’s secret…

        Personally, I find it easier to identify emotionally with suffering than with resurrection. I have lived with grief and loss; I have not yet experienced life after death.

        And so, in this post-Easter period, I find myself thinking about what crucifixion must have been like.

        Modern research suggests that crucifixion was designed to be as painful and prolonged as possible. Romantic paintings that show Jesus serenely surveying the countryside from an elevated viewpoint, while women picnic near his feet, distort reality.

Comforting others

  Having torn my own hand open on a nail in recent weeks, I now know from experience that nails driven through his palms could not have held him up. Nails had to crunch through the bones in his wrists to bear his weight. Additional nails, pounded through his ankles, let him push up, momentarily, to ease the strain on his upper body.

        It could take days to die. Of cardiac arrest. Lung congestion. Asphyxiation. Thirst. Even sunburn…

        And in this agony, Jesus could offer reassurance to a fellow victim?

        Yet I have experienced that phenomenon myself. Two months before my friend Peter Honor died of colon cancer, I tried to tell him how much I cared about what was happening to him. But I choked up. What came out was, “I’m afraid I may never see you again!”

        And then I found myself sobbing on his shoulder.

While he comforted me.

        It should have been the other way around.

Hidden strength

 I’ve seen this before.

        In a strange way, this reversal of roles gives me hope. I do not know what happens after death. And although some friends and acquaintances seem quite sure they know – and offer a variety of texts as proof – they won’t know for sure either, until they get there, wherever “there” is.

        Jesus himself was notably silent about life on the far side of the tomb. The Bible says nothing about the nature of life after death – except in a one parable, a fictional tale told to illustrate a point about life in the here-and-now.

        Most of what we believe about heaven and hell comes from Dante’s fevered imagination, the fanciful metaphors of the Qur’an, the visions of an exile on the island of Patmos.

        But nobody has come back to tell us about it.

        The thing that gives me confidence is not any biblical promise, but the observation that those nearest to death often have the strength to comfort others.

        They must draw their strength from somewhere. It can’t be from this life, because they have so little left to draw on. So it must come from something beyond.

        I don’t need to know exactly what that “beyond” is to believe that resurrection is possible.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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