Lent, Day 31: I AM

Matthew 22:23-33

When people who don’t believe in the resurrection start asking questions about life after the resurrection, you know something is afoot.  

Jesus didn’t fall prey to the Sadducees when they came to throw their spin-doctored question to Him.  They believed that at physical death, life was over, ended, stopped, ceased.  Jesus had a different worldview.  They focused on death.  Jesus focused on life.  Death, for Jesus, wasn’t the end; it was a transition into His “Father’s house” (see John 14:2). 

Dying and death take place in the physical world, but for those who have come to faith in Christ Jesus, dying and death were taken care of when Jesus rose up from the dead on that first Easter morning.  Death is the gate to the very presence of God.  This led Jim Hill to write in his song, 

What a day that will be, 

When my Jesus I shall see, 

And I look upon His face, 

The One who saved me by His grace; 

When He takes me by the hand, 

And leads me through the Promised Land, 

What a day, glorious day that will be.                                    

                                       Jim Hill, 1955 

There seems to be a preoccupation with death in the world. Maybe because it is an upcoming fact for all of us.  But Jesus isn’t about death.  He is about life, abundant life, at work in the world right now. If we get too preoccupied with what life in the resurrection might or might not be about, we drift away from the most precious reality of all, that God is with us in Jesus.  What will happen in the resurrection is a God thing, not ours.  We have no capacity to comprehend it.  We can look forward to it, speculate about it, even dream about it, but what we most need to do is to trust the God who comes to us in Jesus, suffers, dies, and is raised again.  In Jesus we are alive.  Let God take care of the details.

In the Lenten Season, we are called to humble ourselves, to seek the face of God, and to pray that God would search us in order that we might be led “in the everlasting way” (Psalm 139:24).  As Fernando Ortega wrote,

And when I come to die; 

Oh, and when I come to die,  

Give me Jesus 

You can have all this world 

But give me Jesus.