Children have a knack for asking questions which adults find unanswerable. So it was recently when my friend’s three year old son asked his mother ‘What language do they speak in heaven?’ He was disappointed when we explained that there was no answer we could give beyond, ‘We’ll know when we get there.’ It’s the kind of question that is stuck on Earth, with an answer far beyond our human imagining.
When the women went to the tomb the first Easter morning, they were devastated to find that the stone had been rolled away and Jesus’ body removed. They met two angels and, terrified, they bowed their heads. The angels asked them, ‘Why do you seek the living among the dead?’ The women realised that that their concerns were misplaced and they were asking all the wrong questions. Jesus had already told them that he would rise again on the third day, they just hadn’t understood. Until that moment, they could only see an empty tomb, not the radical new reality.
Jesus’ resurrection invites us to move beyond our narrow human mindset, our Earthly questions, to see something totally different. This Eastertide I hope we can take up that invitation.
Frances Stratton
