Facing death – why should I bother about Jesus? Part 5
Death is always a tricky subject, most of us don’t like to think about it until we are forced to. When you are forced to think about death it can be pretty hard. As a minister of a church I had to think about death on pretty much a daily basis, people die and there is no way of getting around this.
Some people have wanted to discredit Christianity on the basis that part of what it says is that there is a life after death. Christians are accused of making up the story of Jesus so that they have a way of avoiding the finality of death.
Well just because something is desirable doesn’t mean that is can’t therefore exist. I think the nonsense of this argument is pretty clear really. I might desire to have a great big bar of chocolate but that doesn’t mean that the great big bar of chocolate therefore does not exist.
I want to go back to Jesus again. Jesus doesn’t make all the questions about life and death go away but he does provide some answers to the hardest questions. Jesus died on the cross – nearly every serious historian believes this. The evidence for this event is overwhelming.
Then Jesus rose from the dead. Most historians accept that the disciples believed that Jesus had risen from the dead. Now we could argue about whether the disciples were deluded but I think the evidence is pretty good that they weren’t and even in the ancient world people understood that when someone died they stayed dead. Something remarkable happened.
There isn’t time to explore the meaning of the resurrection in detail in a blog but let’s say that the resurrection of Jesus says something very important about death.
It tells us that there is something after death. Jesus described this something as pretty amazing and wonderful. We could spend a long time exploring that as well.
I think you should bother with Jesus because he tells us something very important about death – that it is not the end.
