The world keeps moving on; nothing stays the same. So wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, some five hundred years before Christ. Change is an unavoidable part of life. Trees shed their leaves in winter, and grow new shoots in spring. Rain alternates with sunshine. Even the Alps are slowly being squeezed and milled by enormous forces.
These changes sometimes strike us as mechanical, monotonous and pointless. The idea of the wheel of fortune, a never-ending cycle of growth and decay, of birth and death lies at the heart of Buddhism, for example. It is a deeply pessimistic idea, echoed by the writer of Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities" - everything is pointless.
Some people go even further, and look on the general direction of change as being for the worse. They imagine that the second law of thermodynamics (which says that heat cannot by itself pass from a cold object to a hotter one) can be applied to any form of effort. For them, everything tends towards mediocrity.
If we think like this, we are wrong. The message of Ecclesiastes is not so gloomy as it seems on the surface. It is a reminder that human wisdom is all very well, and has its place. But to understand life's meaning, we must look at it from God's viewpoint.
From a human viewpoint, change is often painful and unsettling, and the greatest change, death itself, the end of everything. But from God's viewpoint, all change marks a new beginning, a new opportunity.
Our Lord's Resurrection is what gives us this hope. By freeing us from the cycle of sin and its effects through his death, Jesus opens the way forward for us, so that we may start again even from the worst disaster. This is the message of Jesus' threefold forgiveness of Peter, recorded at the end of John's gospel, where the man who has denied his Lord three times is sent to feed the Lord's flock. It is the experience of the church, struck with despair at the crucifixion and charged with power and joy at the resurrection.
So let us see changes in our own lives, our relationships our circumstances, as opportunities to press forward, towards the time when, in St Paul's words to the Corinthians, we are all changed, when death is swallowed up in victory. And, as Paul reminds us at the end of that great hymn of the resurrection in 1 Cor. 15, this tremendous vision must spill over into our practical daily lives. We are to be 'steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord', for we know that our labour in the Lord is not pointless, not worthless, and not in vain.
HD