The author and poet George Eliot once wrote, “Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.” The Roman philosopher Cicero said much the same. He wrote, “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” What second rate comfort! But that is the best the unbelieving world can offer—the sappy sentiment that our dead loved ones somehow “live on” in our memories. It is a sad way to attempt to cope as you walk through the cemetery.

Jesus provides a better solution to death. He promises life. One day Jesus will give your faithful dead back to you—to love and to laugh and to hug and to dance. Body and soul, living and walking in the new heaven and the new earth. How do we know Jesus can and will keep that promise? Because the Son of God descended into the darkness of death himself and emerged on Easter Sunday as the first fruit of the resurrection of all God’s people. In the creed we confess, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” Yet again, Jesus satisfies our greatest needs.