Sonali Perera ( pictured with her daughter)  was a UCCFer (2002-2004). She  went to be with our Lord in 2014 a few weeks before she was due to receive her Phd in Chemistry in Melbourne. This article was written after attending her funeral service

DEAD CERT

Unfortunately we measure the value of life by quantity and not quality,’ said the priest at the remembrance service of a dearly loved friend of ours. She was thirty one years old, had a 2 year old child and had recently moved into a newly built house with her beloved husband.  She suddenly fell ill and in three days, she was dead.  Died in her husband’s arms.
I do not remember exactly all of what the priest said, but from what I do remember I would ask: Why do we measure people’s lives in quantity and not in quality? God has given us eternal life in caskets called bodies for a temporary time for us to learn about God’s Love toward us. And we have forgotten that we are created to have an everlasting life with God. So the priest said “Ask yourselves whether it is the quantity or quality of years that we live that matters.”

Jesus himself said to us “Look at the birds. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you more worthy than they?”  So why worry? So what keeps us from living quality lives each hour of the day?
Sri Lanka went through a thirty year ethnic war.  At the beginning, the majority Sinhalese, supported by the Sinhala government, massacred the Tamils. I was studying in my second year at university in the city. The island was under curfew, but mobs were burning Tamil residences aided by the government electoral list, and beating up the Tamils mercilessly and sometimes killing them.  One day, I was rushing home on my bicycle when I saw a young man being beaten up by a man using a thick pole, with the mob jeering at him and a soldier with a gun, just standing by. Watching the scene, I wanted to intervene but my flesh was weak, and I peddled away. To this day I ask myself should have I intervened? I will regret this inaction till my dying moment.

During this period of violence my friends and I went about doing what we could, trying to safeguard the people we knew, caring for them with a few pieces of bread and stuff (there were lots of shortages and bread queues were yards long) and on these occasions I lost faith in God: God The Creator; God the Sustainer: God The Saviour; God The Righteous Judge.

As a Christian group in the university we had had lots of debates and talks about the reality of a Creator and a Sustainer God who came to us to show the Way, the Truth and the Light. Our work of Evangelism was fierce, because we knew that if our identities were formed by what we do and not who we are in God, we fail the society around us. We ‘fought’ the various “isms (atheism, secularism, etc. etc.) around us, to know for ourselves that truth and the urgency to share that truth. But now, looking at the carnage around me, all that died.

Then I was reminded of something that picked me up then (and picks me up every moment) when I am in Sheol (Hell): Is Jesus alive today or not?

And each time the answer is “Yes.” He is alive. Amidst the carnage, blood and flesh, “Yes.” He is alive. If he is alive, then what God said to Cain will still apply. “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground”  (Genesis 4:10).  And I am comforted. The Righteous Judge will judge us but not as finicky, puny, wavering, ambitious, human beings. The Creator will judge what the Creator created, because it is only the Creator who can know the created, through and through.

But how do I know whether this ‘truth’ is a figment of my imagination? Is it just to make me have “Peace in my heart and to hell with the others around me?” Is it an invention of the so called Christians to line their pockets? Is it to set up “Christian” institutions, to travel around the world and be awarded meritorious awards? How do I know whether the Bible is an invention of the Western governments to brainwash people to think only of a heaven and never care about the injustices in the world around them and fight and dethrone tyrants in this world?

A countless number of times, students in Sri Lanka used to come and ask us to prove that God exists and we were very busy trying to answer and articulate that God exists.  It just exhausted us. We knew then that they were having fun watching us rattle through all what we knew to be truth and they were not serious at all to consider what we were saying. To put it in another way – listen to us talk while the food was being digested in their stomachs!

Then we changed our ‘strategy’.

We put questions to those who came to ask us questions.

We asked them to prove that the Tomb where Jesus was laid was not empty, that Jesus did not rise from the dead. We would begin with these questions.
In history there is a character called Jesus. Christians believe he is still living today, after His crucifixion (death on a cross) by the Roman Government. The questions we asked were:

1.  Did a man called Jesus really live?(Internal evidence: Bible, Church history etc.; External evidence : Other Historians, changes in governments etc.)?
2. Did He die on the Cross or is it possible he simply fainted (later revived by the coolness in the cave, he rolled the stone away and came out and went to India and died there)?
3.  Is it possible that the disciples came at night to the tomb, took Jesus’ body away and buried him somewhere else (because they were claiming that Jesus is alive and someone might discredit them by producing His body or because they would be laughed at for claiming that Jesus was alive)?
4. Or did the religious leaders who sent Jesus to death, steal  his body ( so that if the disciples were claiming that Jesus is alive they could produce the body to discredit them or just in case Jesus actually rose, they could see to it that he did not last)?
5. Or did the Roman government take away Jesus’ body in the fear of what he said and the possibility that he might rise from the dead and topple the government etc.?
6. Is it possible that God did not allow Jesus to die? Perhaps God substituted another man in the place of Jesus on the cross and made that man die?

We asked our friends to do their own work to find true faith, answering the questions above, and some did and they are now some of the strongest Christian leaders in our part of the world because they know for themselves (personally) that Jesus lives. They needed to find out for themselves (first hand) if there is any other plausible explanation of what happened to Jesus or is the only explanation to the empty tomb, the truth that Jesus did indeed die and rise again. And reigns in Christian hearts today!

For my part, I am sure of the empty tomb.  I am ‘dead’ sure!

Are you?

Rohan Wickramaratne

(rohanwickramaratne.wordpress.com)