By Rev’d Robert Parrish
ALFRED, Lord Tennyson’s great poem In Memoriam AHH, published in 1850, was a tribute to his late friend Arthur Hallam. In it, Tennyson attempts to reconcile the facts of death and sorrow with a belief in providence. He concludes that we have to live our lives by faith. ‘We have but faith: we cannot know; for knowledge is of things we see; and yet we trust it comes from thee, a beam in darkness: let it grow.’
Darwinian science had shown human beings to have emerged out of the lower forms of life; yet we possess reason and have the power to contemplate and understand nature. We see order in the world and are inclined to think we must be here for a purpose. ‘Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: thou madest man, he knows not why, he thinks he was not made to die; and thou hast made him: thou art just.’
For non-believers, belief in an afterlife might appear wishful thinking, mere assertion. But the Church owes its existence and survival to the conviction of the first Christians that they had seen Jesus alive three days after his death by crucifixion. ‘He hadn’t been restored to his old, mortal life, but was now alive in a permanent, irreversible, inextinguishable way’ (CFD Moule). Without that experience the Christian movement would have collapsed, and Jesus would have been forgotten. Instead, the Christian movement experienced a second Spring, and the faith that seemed finished on Good Friday afternoon is now followed by over two billion people. The followers of Jesus became fearless in the face of death because they knew they would share in his resurrection if they simply followed him. ‘In death we are taken up, called, brought home, and finally accepted by God into himself. It is the hidden, unimaginable, new act of the Creator, of him who calls into existence the things that are not’ (Hans Küng)
But what will the afterlife be like? We don’t know, for we live by faith not certainty. ‘Dying into God is the supreme act of faith in a life lived by faith’ (RE Brown).
But we have Jesus’ promise that God will not let death separate us from Him. ‘God has prepared for those who love him what no eye has ever seen, and no ear has heard, and what no human mind has ever even thought of.’ (1 Corinthians verse 9).
I have spoken much of faith in this article. But what is faith, and why is it so important to have it?
I will attempt to answer that question in my next column.
