I want us to respond to this great Easter text from the Gospel of Mark by building our thoughts around three words. The first is ...

I. Comfort!

We should be comforted by the fact that our Lord always keeps His promises. The women were told, "Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee. You will see Him there, just as He told you before he died" (Mark 16:7). He told them He would meet them in Galilee and He was keeping that promise. In our own meditations through Holy Week as we approached Easter, I have had an opportunity, as you have, to think again and again and again about the great resurrection promises.

This whole city has had an opportunity to think about the promises of the resurrection, for this has been a very tragic week in Atlanta. Four young lawyers suddenly taken from us along with the pilot of another plane. Two planes collided in mid-air of an unknown cause and five relatively young men were suddenly taken from us. A son of this church, age 34, was killed in a rather freakish accident involving a forklift. It makes you think about the resurrection when a tornado touches down on your street and misses your house and destroys the next four.

The resurrection is something we ought to think about, and when we think about it, our thoughts always turn around the great promises:

"I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am there you may be also."

"Because I live you shall live also."

"Those who believe in Me though they are dead, yet shall they live..."

"Lo, I am with you always."

In the challenges and chances of life, we hold on to these stout promises that enable us to look beyond the present suffering, sorrow or calamity, and give us strength to make our way through with His companionship.

Easter is the "main event" of Christianity. It is the victory of Easter that helps us move beyond our suffering and the inevitable questions, "Why? Why did this happen to me? Why did this happen to mine?" We move beyond that because of the Resurrection to more important questions, "How? How can I face this pain? How can I handle this loss, this challenge, this hurt? How can I turn this pain into a new purpose?" Only the resurrection can provide us the capacity to do that.

John Irving wrote a rather thought-provoking novel entitled, A Prayer for Owen Meany. Owen Meany, the central character, had some profound and probing observations about the Christian faith and about the resurrection in particular. He said, and I quote:

"I find that Holy Week is draining; no matter how many times I have lived through his crucifixion, my anxiety about his resurrection is undiminished -- I am terrified that, this year, the resurrection won't happen... Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don't believe in the resurrection, you're not a Christian believer."2

Again and again I am called upon to minister to people in the catharsis of grief, tragedy and pain. I must tell you that I do not know what a person would do or could do in the face of the sorrows of this world without a belief in the resurrection hope and the resurrection promises. I do not subscribe to the point of view about life that Eugene O'Neill, the playwright, advanced in his rather autobiographical play titled Long Day's Journey into Night. What he said was that we are born into the brightest light we will ever know and, from that point on, the shadows begin to gather. The shadows deepen as we move further and further into life until finally we come to total darkness and into that total darkness we slip. That's not the Christian view of life. "Light and life to all He brings, risen with healing in His wings."