Skip to main content

Jesus came to earth... to die for us




Outside, a white frost covers the ground.  Shrivelled brown stalks stick up out of the bare earth, and the trees stand leafless against the steely sky.  The light comes late, and leaves early, casting long shadows as it goes.  Life and colour has faded away.  This is the season of death.

Yet we know that under the frosty soil, seeds and roots are preparing for their rebirth in spring.  Green shoots will sprout, dancing daffodils appear, and the world will come to life once more.  And between the death and the life, we celebrate Christmas.

We don’t fear the death of winter, because we know that it is only the prelude to new life.  Jesus, too, spoke of his death as the means to glory, and used the analogy of a seed in winter.  If a grain of wheat isn’t buried, he said, it stays just that: one solitary seed.  But when it dies, it can bring forth a whole new plant, bursting with heads of grain.  And he issues a challenge, recorded by all four gospel writers: Do you value your life enough to risk losing it?

But then we learn that our lives have already been lost.  “Don’t you know that everyone who has been baptized, has been baptized into Jesus’ death?” says Paul.  That decision to follow Jesus has already taken us through death and into a different kind of life.  The symbolic burial of baptism – in many churches, shown by a plunge into a pool of water – unites us with Christ on the cross and gives us the gift of his resurrection.  Although winter is still all around us, we know that spring is coming.

So now we have new eyes to look at life and death.  Jesus’ coming reduced our lives to worthless husks, yet gave them more value than we ever imagined.  And death is no longer the ultimate and fearful doom.  Its sting has been pulled; it is now merely a pause on our journey to eternity.

We still grieve, of course.  We still get angry, we still mourn, we still weep.  We still cry out over the unfairness, the insanity of it all.  We still miss the ones we love.

But now we have a hope that can overcome the fear of death.  The hope that Christmas marks the crossing point from winter to spring.  The hope in a baby who brought life into the world – and who died, and who brought life again.  The hope that there’s a new plant inside every buried seed.

This Christmas, may the fear of winter be taken from you, and the hope of spring be planted in your heart.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Trent Valley: Twyford, both ways

To complete my loop along the Dove Valley  from the mouth at Newton Solney up to Dovedale at Thorpe, across to Matlock on the Limestone Way , and back south along the Derwent Valley , I needed to walk one last section along the River Trent from Derwent Mouth to Repton. Originally I planned to do it in that direction. But for various reasons I ended up doing it the other way. The walk from Repton to Ingleby was completed weeks ago, at the beginning of June, and, for the sake of completeness, I also, later, walked from Findern to Twyford, on the other bank of the river. If I had done the walk sixty years or more ago, I could have crossed the river by ford or ferry at Twyford, and that would have been my most direct route home. the Trent at Twyford Walk 1: Repton to Ingleby Starting from the centre of Repton, I made my way out of the village and crossed the fields to Milton. Wystan Arboretum Milton The Trent Rivers Trust has been busy establishing the Trent Valley Way . This sect...

Derwent Valley: Reaching Derwent Mouth!

It was a much more sensible temperature for walking, and I was excited to explore Shardlow, a small village which was once a bustling port at the end of the Trent and Mersey Canal. This walk would take me to the end of the Derwent and on to the River Trent. I parked in the free car park off Wilne Lane and was soon crossing the Trent and Mersey. Shardlow must have been packed with pubs in its heyday, and a surprising number are still functioning. I passed the New Inn, the Malt Shovel, the Clock Warehouse, and the Dog and Duck. Heritage Centre St James' Church had an enclosed space at the back which seemed to function as library, meeting room, kitchen, and chapel. It was cosy and carpeted - much warmer than the rest of the church in winter, I'm sure. I felt as if I was trespassing on somebody's living room. The main church had numbered pews and a tall pulpit. I liked the patterned altar cloth. I was back on London Road - the old A6 into Derby - and it was a long straight stre...

Trent Valley: the march of the pylons

In the 1980s, the River Trent supplied the cooling water for fifteen coal-fired power stations, each one gobbling up coal from the local mines and quenching its heat with gallons of river water. The area was known as Megawatt Valley . As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, the mines closed, the coal trains stopped running, and the iconic cooling towers, one by one, fell to the ground. The high-voltage electricity lines which connected the stations to the grid are still there, however, and they dominated the walk I did today. The stately silhouettes of pylons stalked across the landscape, carrying fizzing power lines which sliced up the sky. At one point, I was within view of two of the remaining sets of cooling towers. Diving further back into history, I parked by Swarkestone Lock on the Trent & Mersey Canal, walked past St James' Church, and arrived at Swarkestone Bridge, a 14th-century causeway which still, remarkably, carries traffic today. It was famously the southernmos...