I was thinking how that reading from Ecclesiastes is a sort of A-Z of all the things in life that there is time for. Steve’s A-Z about his Dad is almost an echo of it. The alphabet of life is the alphabet of time and by the sounds of it Jack lived it to the full. He was fully literate in life.

Truth be told, it makes me think of another alphabet which begins with Alpha but ends with Omega. It’s the alphabet of God, not because God has a beginning or an end, but because everything that does begin, begins from Him, and everything that ends, ends in Him. The Risen Christ solemnly proclaims of Himself in the Book of the Apocalypse, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last. All those wounded creatures of nature which Jack loved; all those dams where he and Steve fished; all those night stars he loved to gaze upon; all those foreign lands he loved to visit: they came from the beautiful, creative mind of God, like so many signs of his love for us, and of his hope that we will love him in return.

More importantly, Jack himself, as every single one of us here, also came from the beautiful and creative mind of God. If it’s true that for every time there is a season, it’s truer still that to every thing there is a purpose. It is truest of all that for every one there is a destiny that surpasses all seasons and all times. At a point in time, God created Jack, but not so that he would then end at another point in time. No, the intrusion of death, the insolent interruption which death tries to force on us, is not our final end, understanding end as purpose. God never desired death; death infected humanity because, duped by evil, our first parents thought they could survive without God. They thought they could live without eternity. They chose time over eternity. That is death’s monstruous claim: that human beings stop when the clock stops on their earthly life. But that claim is a lie, as was the illusion that we could live without God.

But the God of life and love wasn’t about to let us go so easily. Instead, the heroic love of God for us did death to death; he did not do us to death. The Alpha and Omega took on our flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, and assumed in that flesh the shape of the Cross so as to do away with the lies, so as to die for us. As he died, death imploded. The love of Christ’s heart for us pulverised death as the end of us, because death can only feed on lies and Christ is nothing but pure, unadulterated Truth. He is also unadulterated Life, eternal life. On the day Jack was baptised, by a pure unmerited gift, Christ joined Jack spiritually to his own death and resurrection. On the day Jack died to this life, that gracious reality of his baptism began its final phase of liberating him from sin and death. Jack’s body alone has died, but not Jack himself. He is very much alive to God, even more so than when he was alive in the body. The final phase of his liberation from death will reach completion when, with all who have believed in Jesus, Jack and Rosemary and Steve and every single person who has sought to live in true love is raised in the flesh on the last day. The Last Day. The Omega point, the Z which is a new A in an unending alphabet of life of glory and of eternal joy and peace.

Steve ended his eulogy by saying, “I will miss Jack, my Dad and best friend.” That’s proof that death is not right, it’s not human, because it separates those who love one another. That is why the destruction of death by Christ is the greatest, most wonderful reality and truth there can be. Death’s keys are now in his hands. And on the day the Father has set in his inscrutable wisdom, Christ will unlock the gates of death and summon back to life in the flesh all who have proved worthy of him.

So, we commend Jack to the merciful love of the Lord of life and death, our beginning and our end, that he may ready him for the glory of eternity and for the unfailing gladness of the fullness of life and love.