My wishes for all of you with a happy Easter celebrated today by Egypt’s Copts, Resurrection is one of the miracles of God – blessed be His name– in which every soul, whether good or evil, returns to the human’s body which it had left after death. And thus, bodies do rise in a new glorified nature before God the Judge in order to be whether granted an eternal life or to be doomed with eternal damnation according to its works. Thusly, Resurrection is the door through which the righteous enter into happiness and eternal life, and at the same time it is the entrance of the wicked towards eternal judgment and destruction.
In the teachings of the Lord Christ about the resurrection of the dead, we see His speech with some of the Sadducees; a sect that believes neither in the resurrection of the dead nor in the presence of the angels, saying, “But concerning the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” He frequently linked the public resurrection to the final judgment: “Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation.” Thus, in the resurrection, everyone will receive fair judgment according to what he had done during his life. So, waiting for the resurrection and getting prepared for it becomes either a hope or an alert: it is a hope for every good honest man in his life that he should continue offering good to everyone, and an alert to every evil person that he shall repent and have his life changed. Here I recall words written by someone before his death, entitled “a counsel from a dead man”:
Consider thoroughly what I wrote at my death. I will not worry, I will not care about my worn out body; people will do what is necessary: They will strip me of my clothes, then wash me, and enshroud me, afterwards, I will be taken out of my house and delivered to my new dwelling place: I mean the tomb.
Many will come to my funeral, but rather many of them will cancel his work and his appointments for my burial, and some of them had never thought to advise me one day! As for my things like my keys, my books, my bag, my shoes, my clothes, etc., they will be disposed of, if my family are good people, they will donate them.
Make sure that the world will not grieve for me, and its movement will never stop: the economy will go on, my job will be occupied by someone else, while my money will go to the heirs and I will be held accountable before God for it, whether it is much or few! Upon my death, many things will fall, at their top is my name, immediately after my death, I will be described as the dead body, and no one will ever call me by the name I used to hear. When they pray for me, they will inform others about the date of the funeral and will not call me with my name, upon starting to bury me, they will say: “Fetch the reposed” yet, they will not mention my name as they used to, however this would be my title since then.
For that, I will not be proud of my ancestry, nor will I be allured by it, nor by my family. I will not take pride in a pose I occupied, or in fame that followed my works, really, how inferior this world is! and how great is what we are about to face!”.
Then he moves to speaking about the living mankind, saying, “O You who still lives on earth: You shall know that grieving over you will be of three types: those who know you on a shallow level will say: “O dear!” your friends will grieve for hours or days and then they will return to their talk and laughs, while the deepest grief will be at your home as your family would stay in a state of mourning, whether a long or short one, but eventually you will be in the archive of memories. Your story among people is over, but the real story has begun, and the real life has begun: the eternal life. You have nothing left; your beauty, money, health, palaces, wife, and children have all gone away, nothing is left for you except what you have done during the journey of your life on earth.
I ask you: What have you prepared for your Afterlife during your earthly life?!
It is the only truth that needs a pause and cogitation followed by behavior,
So, take heed to your love towards God and people, your prayers and your living relationship with God, your charity works that must be carried out secretly, your righteous deeds, and your continual repentance for all your sins.”
The Resurrection is a call to every human being to wait and think about what he shall prepare for his day, on earth I mean, and what he shall prepare for his future, his true life that comes after crossing the bridge of death. Trying to escape from it through preoccupation or forgetfulness will only lead to an endless tragedy, while rejecting the presence of resurrection and eternal life does not abolish its truth.
I recall what I read in one of the major four-year medical studies carried out on a large number of patients with heart attack experience. Nearly 2,000 patients were studied in 15 hospitals in the United Kingdom, Austria and the United States. It was found that nearly 40% of survivors, after the success of their heart-warming process, have narrated some events they saw or felt during the period they were presumed dead.
It is known medically that brain stops 20-30 seconds after cardiac arrest, but one of the cases whom the doctors managed to revive after the heart had stopped for three minutes described what the doctors had done and the sounds of equipment. Some of them talked about a sense of peace filled them, while some others expressed conflicting feelings of fear and panic or a sense of drowning, and some of them said that they saw a shining light like a sunrise.
In another report of the British Daily Mail, the newspaper reported doctors in Canada about cases in which brain activity was found to continue after death and complete cardiac arrest, doctors monitored electronic waves emitted similar to those emitted from a sleeping person for a period reached 10 minutes; a scientific result was developed that another life in which man enters does exist after death and that death is not the end.
The experience of Dr. Ivan Alexander, a surgeon who does not believe in the existence of soul or life after death, is the most exciting experience in this subject. Dr. Alexander fell into coma that lasted for seven days due to severe meningitis, which ended in a miraculous way, taking him back to life. In his book “Proof of Heaven”, he recounts his experience of a life after death journey through visiting some heavenly places, and as a doctor he refuted the scientific experiments to explain what he had gone through; one of his most beautiful quotes: “The experience of life after death is real, and so vast that the experience of human life on earth seems like a dream compared to it!”
And…Stories never end in Beautiful Egypt!
General Bishop
Head of Coptic Orthodox Cultural Center
