At my desk at City
Hall one day, I scanned Portage la Prairie’s Fees & Charges Schedule for
2018. It’s posted on the City website, should you ever need to know how much
it’ll cost you to buy a pet license (free until the end of March), photocopy a tax
bill, rent a mosquito fogger, have your water turned on, or buy a grave—among
many other things.
I perused the
cemetery fees with great interest. Adult burial plots range from $870 to $970,
not counting opening and closing. No matter how hard I studied the schedule, I
could not find a fee for a grave that you want to rent temporarily.
One of the popular
songs on Christian radio for the past year has been, The Cross Has the Final Word, written by Cody Carnes and recorded by The Newsboys. Although I understand what
the song is trying to say, I think it misses the mark. The intent of the key
phrase is that the power of Jesus Christ and what he accomplished by dying on
the cross trumps everything—sin, disease, war, religion, and death.
But it wasn’t his
cross that achieved all that. If the cross really had the final word, then
Jesus Christ would be just another crucified Jew. We may never have heard of
him. If an instrument of death has the final word, then death wins. If the
cross has the final word, there is no hope for me.
As a kid, I learned
how Jesus’s followers buried his body in a rich man’s tomb, fulfilling a
prophesy made centuries earlier. I always assumed this spoke to Jesus’s poverty,
that he lived without enough means to buy a burial plot of his own. While
that’s probably true, a more profound thought occurred to me a couple of years
ago.
It wasn’t until our
church started singing a song called Resurrecting (by Elevation Worship) that
it finally dawned on me. It says, “The tomb where soldiers watched in vain was
borrowed for three days.” The body of Jesus wasn’t placed in a borrowed tomb
because he was poor, but because he would only need it for a little while! I
wonder what our local funeral directors would say if I walked in and said I’d
like to take care of some pre-arrangements, but I only needed my grave for
three days.
The final word is not
the cross of Good Friday. It is the resurrection of Sunday. It is Christ’s
empty tomb that really has the final word. Which means it isn’t truly empty at
all, because it’s filled with hope. A song written by two of the worship
leaders at my church says, “The empty grave holds my hope each day.” I love
that, because it speaks not only of life after death, but life right now,
filled with hope and purpose every day. Who here doesn’t want that?
Titus 3:8 says, “God’s
gift has restored our relationship with him and given us back our lives. And
there’s more life to come—an eternity of life! You can count on this.”
No matter how far
from God you think you are, the truth is that you’re never more than one step
from him. Easter is the perfect time to take that one step. The late Reverend
Billy Graham said, “I’ve never met a man who accepted Jesus Christ and
regretted it.”
