There are two inevitabilities in life. We are born into life and we will die. Here we have one of Jesus’s great ‘I am...’ statements. A declaration at a time of death.

Words full of emotion. Let us look at the context:

Mary and Martha are grieving the death of a brother. There is grief/frustration/emptiness/delay.  Jesus tells the disciples He is going to ‘wake him up’. There is confusion and misunderstanding. Lazarus is raised from the dead. There is amazement/disbelief/relief/anger and plotting.

The Bible tells us that the very reason Jesus was born, was so that life could be taken from Him on the cross, so that He then could be raised to life again. Martha and the disciples could not, at this time, fully understand what He meant by these words. However, look at Martha’s faith! Her answer:

    “Yes Lord. All along I have believed that You are the Messiah, the Son of God who comes into the world.” (The Message)

Jesus was declaring that death had no power over Him or over those who believe in Him. He is offering us life in all its fullness, lived in relationship with Him, that will not end when we die.

This is what Christians celebrate this Advent season. If you are not yet a Christian, how do you respond to Jesus’s question ‘Do you believe this?’

    ‘To the secular philosopher, life starts from nothing. It rises to a peak, to a brief flowering of autonomy, of pleasure, of meaning in the middle of life. And then it gradually declines into decay, dissolution and finally death. It rises to a crescendo and then slowly fades away into nothingness. But the Christian view of a human life transformed by God’s power is totally different. It is a slow and growing crescendo. It is a journey, a pilgrimage, which starts from nothing but grows and grows:
The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day’ (Proverbs 4:18)’. John Wyatt

Christine Fairfield