Few people get to live a life as blessed, as successful, and as prosperous as Thomas Jefferson. He was born to wealth and then lived in luxury all of his 83 years. He enjoyed good health for 82 of those years; only in his last year of life did he begin to fail. He lived at an extraordinary time in history, playing a huge role in the founding of a nation and the creation of a new form of government. At the age of 33 he was already a respected politician. He was selected by the other Founding Fathers, all brilliant men themselves, to write the Declaration of Independence. What he wrote is still considered one of the greatest political documents of all time. He lived for ten years in Paris as the United States ambassador to France. He was a celebrity there, spending every day surrounded by the best, the brightest, and the wealthiest of what was then one of the most powerful nations on earth. He served two terms as president, during which he made the largest land purchase in the history of the world—the two and a half million-acre Louisiana Purchase, at three cents an acre. He founded the University of Virginia. He was interested in everything, and he had the wealth and leisure to pursue all of his many interests: politics, of course, along with science, farming, history, architecture, literature, philosophy, and even some theology. His was a blessed and charmed life in almost every way.
Then, just like all other lives, Jefferson’s life came to an end; and it ended in old age, illness, despair, and debt. Everything he had accumulated had to be auctioned off to pay his many creditors. This included Jefferson’s many slaves, a huge and shameful aspect of the life of this man who had so eloquently declared that “all men are created equal.”
In the last, sad year of his life, Jefferson wrote this in a letter to his friend John Adams:
We are now both in the dark winter of old age when we can think of nothing but how to keep ourselves warm and how to get rid of the heavy hours; until the friendly hand of death shall rid us of all of this, all at once.
Thomas Jefferson did not believe in the Easter story of Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead; so for him, the ‘friendly hand of death’ meant the final end of everything. Jefferson was a firm believer in ‘human reason,’ as understood by the Enlightenment. He was interested in the moral teachings of Jesus, but not in any part of the Bible that was miraculous or divine. In fact, Jefferson did a cut-and-paste job on the New Testament to create his own edited version of the life of Jesus. His version ends with the burial of Jesus in Matthew 27:60. No Easter, and no hope of eternal life.
I want to end my life with more hope than Thomas Jefferson had as he faced his death. Only the Easter story makes that possible. There are no other credible offers on the table for anything else beyond death.
My top priority in life is to be prepared to die. That has been my priority for a long time already. I remember taking this very serious even as a child. It just always seemed logical to me to want to be prepared. After all, we will be dead a whole lot longer than we will be alive; so whatever there is to know about the eternity after death, I want to know it. If there are any preparations to be made, I want to make sure all is in order and I am ready.
Think about it. Many people make very careful preparations for their retirement, which they may or may not reach; but then make no plans or preparations for their death, which they will most certainly reach—perhaps even before their retirement. A person in their 20’s may have to wait 40 years to retire. But that same person, so young and full of life and hope and dreams, could die today. It only seems wise and logical to me to want to be ready at all times.
Eighteenth century English linguist and genius Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said:
He that considers how soon he must close his life, will find nothing of so much importance as to close it well… The business of life is to work out our salvation, and the days are few in which provision must be made for eternity.
What provision, if any, can we make?
Let’s start with what we can see, and what we see is that dead is dead. Bodies wear out, bodies get sick and die, bodies suddenly stop working, bodies get killed; and then there is a burial, and then, end of story. Every time. As a pastor for 40 years, I saw a lot of dead people, did hundreds of funerals, and made many trips to the cemetery to commit a body to the ground; and every one of them has stayed dead. What you see is what you get.
But in the New Testament, we read about a different ending to the story. There, we have a story of many people, who at a definite point in history, SAW something else. They saw a man who had been dead– beaten, crucified, stabbed, dead, and buried– and then, they saw him alive again. They saw him back from the dead, strong and healthy, walking and talking.
The Easter story in John 20 begins in a cemetery. Mary Magdalene is at the tomb of Jesus crying because her friend is dead. She hears someone say her name, she turns, and it is Jesus. For once, dead is not dead. Mary sees something else.
Let’s put this in a more familiar setting. Imagine the sudden death of a young woman in your congregation. Everyone is shocked, the funeral is very sad, the mourners all go to the cemetery for the committal service, and then, everyone returns to the church fellowship hall for lunch. Then, all of a sudden, there she is—the loved one and friend that was just buried. There she is in the food line, dishing up some potato salad and a ham sandwich, and asking the others in line why they are so sad (see John 20:33). Can you imagine the excitement that would create at that funeral luncheon?
That is what it must have been like when Jesus started appearing to many people after his resurrection. Granted, that was only one person. But even one person back from the dead is a game changer; especially if that person had said that by believing in him, we too could rise from the dead. (continued…)
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