Ari has now been church enough to hear about the resurrection, but most of his questions come from visits to his Dad’s grave. Near Peter’s grave are the graves of my brother, Stanley, and my mother and father. Our hunt for their stones has become a tradition and sometimes a contest to see who can find them first.
The other day Ari asked, “What happens when everyone comes back?”
“When who comes back?”
“All the dead people.”
“You mean like your Daddy and Uncle Stanley?”
“Yes.”
“Well, they come back to the earth when Jesus returns, and we all live together with
Jesus forever.”
“But what happens to their stones?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do they go scratch out everything on their stones?”
Ari’s last question left me without an answer. I just said, “That is an excellent question.” It is a question that makes an important point. Our funerals and our gravestones make us think of the person in their grave. Some people go to graves to talk to dead loved ones. Even those who scatter ashes often revisit the place where the ashes blew away. We sometimes refer to the grave as a person’s “final resting place.” But for believers, as Ari points out, there is nothing final about the grave.
Ari was trying to reconcile the gravestones with the resurrection. He was wondering how the stone would or should be rewritten after resurrection. Ari’s point is that the words on the gravestone are just the first draft. They are not the final word.
After our resurrection, we won’t need to revisit our graves and chisel our revisions. The graves stand only as markers of our journey, signs of the way we come. Rather than being the last words concerning us, they are the first words of what is truly life.
