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Good morning. I suppose one could say that there are always too many funerals, but especially so in the last few days. ‘Every second house is having a funeral today’ said a local teacher on Tuesday in Sri Lanka – and as if that wasn’t already enough, Northern Ireland yesterday witnessed the funeral of Lyra McKee, doubtless bringing back memories to far too many people across the communities, of the other untimely burials in that province over the past fifty or more years. Some other words from Sri Lanka brought home to me the terrible pain of such occasions: a bereaved husband and father said that Sunday morning was ‘The end of the story of my daughter and my wife’. The thing about funerals, however, and certainly the funeral of Lyra McKee, is that though they may seem to be the decisive ending to the story of a life – the full stop at the close of the last chapter – in the case of untimely deaths, funerals can serve to unite us in a determination to say that death will not be the final word, that the story will not, must not, end there. From the depths of grief and outrage into which we are plunged by the shattering blow of arbitrary death, a voice, as of conscience, vows that the story must have a different conclusion. On Easter day I was in a very peaceful church with my wife and young children and heard the traditional lesson from the Gospel of John. The disciples run to the tomb, find the stone rolled away, and the grave clothes discarded, but are unsure what to believe – ‘for as yet’ John writes, ‘they did not know the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.’ The word ‘must’ is striking – and of the 30 or so leading translations of the Bible into English, just about every one has that very word. The writer could have said, quite naturally, that the disciples were unsure what to believe because they did not know that Jesus had risen from the dead. But he says something else – what they needed to know was not that Christ had risen, but that he had to, that the story just could not end with his death. Who can fathom the grief of a man who has lost wife and daughter, and laments what seems to be the end of their stories? Yet the voice of lament, in all its pain, ends up as a resolute affirmation of what has been lost, and in that affirmation it holds onto all that is important, all that matters, all which has been of value in lives which seem to have concluded. With a sort of fierce determination, grief carries forwards what mattered into the future, so that even in loss and mourning, however final the parting may seem, we can say that death must not, will not, have the final and conclusive word.