Margaret’s many remarkable qualities and abilities remind me of some of those spectacular mosaics you see in both ancient and modern buildings. The colours and proportions of the mosaic emphasize its more salient features but require that you stand back to take in the whole. Any fair hearing of the family eulogy just heard furnishes you not just with a list of unrelated aspects of this woman of faith and family, but truly leaves you with the impression of having beheld a work of art, a work of God’s art. Margaret may have had a hard life, especially at its beginnings, but she worked hard at life to form and shape it in accordance with her beliefs and formidable will power. From nursing to midwifery, from religious missionary to teacher of religion, from assiduous student to preacher of the Word, from spouse, mother and grandmother to Good Samaritan and undaunted searcher for the Truth: you could almost say that, to echo the words of Job, Margaret did engrave into the rock of her time and space in this life the amazing strength of her character and personality. There would be no doubt left in anyone’s mind that Margaret had a deep sense of who she was and of her purpose in life.
Someone of that ilk will inevitably experience friction in her dealings with others, and I am sure Margaret was well aware of that. Like the rest of us, her own limitations and weaknesses will have been a source of deep personal regret to her. Yet, her very positive approach to life will not have left her moping and ruminating endlessly, but open to the mercy of the Lord and to the renewed hope it alone can confer.
And hope was very much alive in Margaret. Hope is characteristic of the pilgrim, the wayfarer, the one who knows she is going somewhere and perhaps, in Margaret’s case, seems to go everywhere in order to reach that somewhere. Even in the face of failure or tragedy, the hoper refuses to despair, to stand still, to be paralyzed or, worse, to regress to the emptiness of self-pity. By the same token, the hoper does not presume that she has already achieved her final goal as if she were herself the measure of what that achievement would be. Margaret lived in the tension between the forces in life which can pull us back and down and those which urge us forward and upward. And even if, in the end, for Margaret as for us all, her mortality seems to have trumped her heart and soul anchored in hope, she knew that her Redeemer, her Avenger, lives and would take that heart and soul to himself, until the time would come when her spirit would be reunited with her flesh to gaze with her own eyes on God.
And what are St. Paul’s words that “we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet”, if not a clarion call to hope? You can just see Margaret nod vigorously to the imperative tones of St. Paul when he says further: “For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” And you can hear her join her raised voice to Paul’s when he defiantly and mockingly addresses death: “‘O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?’” Margaret was fearless of the sting of scorpions in Pakistan; she is now fearless of the sting of death.
And where does all this hopefulness, this defiance, this fearlessness come from? If it came from some sort of stoic self-assurance, it would be foolish. If it were based on some moralistic or scientistic arrogance, it would be even more foolish. But it was, it is, based on none of this or anything like it. It is based simply on these words: “God gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Why did Jesus not turn up in time to save his friend Lazarus from dying? For the sole reason that he wanted to show that he had the power to deliver Lazarus out of death. The power to prevent someone entering the tomb is surely great. But far greater is the power to bring them out of it. And Jesus Himself entered the tomb in death so that by rising from it he could remove from every human heart the despair and fear that in death we somehow return to the nothingness from which God created us in the first place. The potentates of our age seem variously to boast of their power to murder in mass killings; or to prolong mortal life. But none of them boasts, since none of them can boast, of bringing into immortal life anyone who has died. The death and resurrection of Christ call the bluff on the empty boasting of human beings and expose it for the folly that it is. Instead, the Risen Christ, who was the dead Christ and will now die no more, stretches out his pierced hand to anyone who will take it in trust and hope, to deliver them out of death, to enthrone them in the presence of the eternal Father and on the last day, to raise them glorious in body and spirit.
Like Martha in the Gospel we have just heard, Margaret believed from the deepest roots of her soul that Jesus Christ is the Resurrection and the Life and that even though she might die, yet she would live for ever. It is this faith and hope which shine the brightest light across the mosaic of her life, and it is there to see for anyone whose eyes are open. Margaret was a witness to true hope. Her deepest desire from where she now is in eternity is surely that all those whom she has known and loved in this life will let the light of her witness penetrate their hearts so that they, too, will grab hold of the outstretched hand of the Redeemer and let Him lead them in the same hope of eternal life. And is not that the greatest thing any human being can do for another: to lead them to God, to show them the hope of freedom from despair and from entrapment in their own ego-drama and in the snares of this world which so easily deceive and decoy?
So as we ask our good and merciful Judge to give Margaret the grace to accept in fulness His forgiveness of her sins, we also thank him for the intrepid courage of hope which she demonstrated throughout her 84 years on this earth, and we ask Him to shower us with His grace that we may open our eyes to the wonders of His promises and reach out to Him with our sinful hands in humility and obedience of heart. Eternal rest.