“Promises, promises, I am through with promises, promises…..” So begins a popular Burt Bacharach song from the late 1960s. Little wonder that folks lament the vulnerability and the hurt that promises cause. It’s part of that double-edged sword of relationships. Relationships are our most precious gift on which we hinge our future, and yet the brokenness of promises leaves us empty and sometimes despairing. Even the best of promises in human terms are limited and bound, eventually, to let us down. My promises to you are only as good as my future, and my future is only as strong as my life. The strongest vows we make in human terms, those in marriage, are only good at best “until death parts us.” Death is the great promise-breaker, and therefore the great relationship-breaker, and therefore it threatens to rob life altogether of its meaning.
Unless….unless there were one who, having death already behind him and having overcome its power, were to claim us, call us, love us, forgive us, and invite us into relationship. This is precisely our Easter proclamation, hope, and joy. We belong to, are baptized into, this one—Jesus the Christ—whose promises are based in great love and are not limited nor are they nullified by death. When he says in Matthew 28 at the end of the great commission, “And, lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age,” we may trust fully in this promise because death is no longer ultimate. Resurrection rules the day. As St. Paul says in Romans 8, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Nothing! Not life, not death, not powers and principalities. God’s love for us in Jesus, including not only his resurrection but our baptism into it assures us of the ultimate reconciliation of all relationships in the fullness of the kingdom.
To say “Christ is risen” is to proclaim and to trust that his promises are sure, permanent, worth living for, and worth dying for. A promise unlike any other, because death no longer has the final say.
–Pastor Tim Smith
Bishop, NC Synod
