Resurrection Sunday Means Hope: Do We Fear COVID-19 or Death?

Metropolitan

April 8, 2020

On March 20, 2020, four convicts were hanged at Delhi’s Tihar jail in India. More than seven years earlier, they had brutally raped and killed a 23-year-old young girl, a medical student, on a bus. You may remember it being reported all over the news in 2012.

When these men were taken out from prison to be hanged, reports were shared of their loud, uncontrollable fear and weeping. They knew they were walking out of the prison to the gallows.

Consider this contrast: Two thousand years ago, an innocent, 33 ½ year old man also knew that in a few short days, He would be crucified and killed publicly. And He faced His death with joy. It was His own choice to give His life on the cross for the sake of redeeming the world from sin, fear, death and damnation. His name was the Lord Jesus Christ. The record of this story begins in the Gospel of St. John, chapter 12. I encourage you to read it.

Today, all of humanity lives in the shadow of the fear of death. Covid-19 has caused all people throughout the whole world—regardless of wealth, color, religion or nationality—to realize their helplessness. We have no control over our future or our life on earth. All have become equal.

The one common denominator for all of humanity is the dark curtain we all must pass through called “death.”
The week before Resurrection Sunday (also called “Passion Week”) speaks of Jesus’ intentionality in going to Jerusalem, riding on a donkey and, within a few days, being put to death. He came to earth for this—that through His suffering and death on our behalf and His rising again from the grave, we as humanity need never to fear death again.

When the early church fathers talked about the end of one’s life, they called it “departing”—the event when we leave our decaying bodies to be in a better world, where we will never experience sorrow, tears or separation.
Whether it is this current Covid-19 virus, or 1,000 other unknown enemies of our temporal lives, let us not fear but know we are given life eternal by the living God, who made us not for time but for eternity.

A follower of Christ, St. Paul, said these words that we too can repeat, “Where O death is your victory? Where O death is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55).

Jesus rose from the grave. We never need to panic or fear because the God of life is in us and walks with us now and throughout eternity.

Let us not forget that the Cross of Christ and His resurrection is the epicenter of the universe and all of human history. Christ’s death and resurrection was not just the greatest event in history, but it was the transforming change to history.

We live because He lives. Rejoice!