Caistor St Edmund

I was recently reading about the last in the Mission Impossible film series, which has just been released in the various different ways these things happen now. It reminds me for the first time in ages of queuing for a film at the cinema in Felixstowe one school holiday, only to hear that they had run out of tickets and we had to come back tomorrow. That problem doesn’t really occur in the age of multiplexes and streaming services, but I did get a café trip as compensation from my very apologetic dad.

Amongst the various things impossible things connected to the films are the following:

1. It is impossible that Tom Cruise still looks like that, when he was already an actual adult when I was born, and I am told I already look quite a bit older than the picture above.
2. The internet tells me that the first film came out in 1996, when I was still at school, nearly 30 years ago, which seems an impossibly long time ago.
3. My children are all apparently old enough to watch most of them now, because the youngest is nearly 12, which is impossible because of course they are all so tiny.

We know these things aren’t impossible. They are all only, in some way, resisting the passage of time. But there is a lot more than that which is not impossible. It turns out, you see, that the missions aren’t impossible either. Whether it is hanging from the ceiling of an impregnable CIA strongroom, or crawling along the top of a TGV in the Channel Tunnel, Tom finds a way to do it.

The story of Jesus (where we always end up) is different. It’s not a story of discovering that things weren’t as hard as they seem, but one where the truly impossible was made possible. It’s one where the most certain and final of things, death itself, was made no longer the end, but the beginning. If you happen to be reading this on Sunday 8^th June, the Day of Pentecost, that’s the day we remember, among other things, that Jesus’s friend Peter said that it was impossible for death to keep hold of Jesus: all of the old certainties had been turned upside-down. Paul, another famous follower of Jesus, often used the simple phrase “But now” to describe the way that the Resurrection of Jesus changes everything. We might have thought that death was the end, but now, through Jesus, eternal life is offered to us.

I might want to deny the reality of aging (I’ll let Tom Cruise speak for himself) but in truth it has been a long time since I stood in that first cinema queue. But I take huge comfort from the fact that even though life after death was impossible, Jesus has found a way.

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