A Sermon for Good Friday, 19 April 2019,
Bloomsbury Central
Baptist Church
Then the criminal who was dying on the cross alongside Jesus
uttered his
last words:
"Jesus,
remember me when you come into your kingdom."
As famous last words go, they’re pretty good.
After all,
not everyone gets their final words recorded in the Bible.
As a slight digression,
I spent a few
minutes looking up other famous last words,
and I
wonder if you can guess who said these:
·
“Friends applaud, the comedy is finished.” - Beethoven
·
“Tomorrow I shall no longer be here.” - Nostradamus
·
"I’m bored with it all.” - Winston Churchill
·
“I should have never switched from Scotch to
Martinis.” - Humphrey Bogart
·
"Jesus, remember me when you come into your
kingdom." - ???
Well, we don’t know his name, or his crime,
merely that
he died alongside Jesus,
and that he
had a moment of profound insight
as he faced the hour of his death.
I don’t know if you’ve given much thought to what happens
when you die?
It’s one of
those things that personally, on the whole,
I try not to think about too often.
I mean, I
am aware that one day I shall, as Shakespeare put it
in Hamlet’s great soliloquy on
death,
‘shuffle off this mortal coil’…
But what
then…?
What next…?
Some might say that we go straight to heaven, and they might
be right;
some say that
we go to Limbo or to Hell,
and I’m less sure that they’re
right.
But I’m still none the wiser as to what it all really means,
because I’m
not sure I really know what heaven is anyway.
As Jesus replied to the Pharisees,
when they
asked him their trick question
about what would
happen to the one bride for seven brothers,
‘It’s not like that’…. (Luke 20.27-40)
(And here,
you understand, I am paraphrasing slightly).
It seems to me that a healthy agnosticism about the nature
of the afterlife
is both
biblical and Christ-like.
Sometimes, not being quite sure
is
infinitely preferable to being very sure,
and some of the most terrifying Christians I’ve met over the
years,
are those
who have certainly
about where
people are going, or not going, when they die.
Better, surely, to trust to God’s love and mercy,
and then
live in the light of that.
As Jesus did say, ‘God is God not of the dead, but of the
living;
for to him
all of them are alive.’ (Luke 20.38)
And so we come to the last words of the criminal on the
cross, and Jesus’ reply.
"Jesus, remember me when you come into your
kingdom."
"Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in
Paradise."
And I’ve been wondering this week, as I’ve been preparing
this sermon,
what it
might mean for us to be remembered by Jesus.
What does it mean for us to exist, eternally, in the memory
of God,
who enters
into our humanity,
dies our death,
and never forgets any of it.
There is a way of thinking about death
that sees
our souls fluttering away from our bodies,
like caged birds set free,
flying up
to heaven to be with Jesus on a cloud.
But the problem with this is that this owes far more
to the
ancient philosophy known as dualism
than it does
to the Jewish-Christian tradition.
Dualism suggests that there is a fundamental separation
between our
souls and our bodies,
that our bodies are merely temporary homes
for the
eternal spark that is our souls.
And whilst this is a very ancient way of looking at things,
coming from
Greek philosophy and the teachings of Plato,
it isn’t something we find clearly in the Christian
scriptures.
You kind of
have to read it in,
if you’re going to see it there.
The Jewish tradition, from which Christianity emerged,
has a far
more unified view of the human person.
We are not a mortal body containing an immortal soul,
but rather each
of us is a person, body and soul in unity,
created and
loved entirely and eternally by God.
So when we die, it is the entirety of our being that enters
into God’s eternity.
In his first letter to the Corinthians,
Paul speaks
of the resurrection body being like a plant
that grows
from a seed that is sown into the ground.
The physical body, the body we have in this life,
is like the
seed,
and the physical death we must all face,
is the
action of being cast into the ground,
and the resurrection we share with Christ,
is both as
continuous and yet different
as the beautiful
flower that grows from a tiny seed.
As Paul says,
‘It is sown a physical body, it
is raised a spiritual body.
If there is a physical body,
there is also a spiritual body.’ (1 Cor 15.44)
This is not some dualistic discontinuity;
rather, who
we are in eternity
is in
direct continuity with who we are temporally.
Our eternal existence, our spiritual body,
is as
unrecognisably different as the plant is from the seed,
but it is
still the same being.
We do not cast off our earthly bodies,
to get new
ones in heaven.
Rather, who we are eternally
arises
directly from who we are today.
And so we are back to the criminal’s last words from the
cross:
"Jesus, remember me when you come into your
kingdom."
"Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in
Paradise."
John Polkinghorne, the brilliant physicist and Anglican clergyman,
who has offered
some profound insights
in the
unity of spirituality and quantum physics
once said:
‘I believe it is a perfectly
coherent hope, that the pattern that is me
will
be remembered by God
and its instantiation will be
recreated by God
when
God reconstitutes me
in
a new environment of God’s choosing.’
In other words, who we are is remembered by God,
and held
fast eternally by God
as part of
God’s creative, dynamic being.
God remembers us,
and
everyone who has ever lived has a place in God’s mind.
In his second letter to the Corinthians,
Paul speaks
of those who follow Christ as being ‘in Christ’,
and he says,
‘If anyone is in Christ, there is
a new creation:
everything old has passed away;
see, everything has become new!’ (2
Cor 5.17)
We are in God through Christ,
we are
remembered by God at the hour of our death,
as Jesus
remembered the criminal dying on the cross alongside him.
Nothing is lost, everything is redeemed,
all sins
are forgiven,
and eternity
is ours.
"Jesus, remember me when you come into your
kingdom."
"Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in
Paradise."
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