Comment by Harborough churches: Great Hope

As a cyclist, I love this time of year. The weather is generally warmer and dryer, and ideal for exploring the countryside on two wheels.

There are also the professional stage races to watch. A few weeks ago, Briton Simon Yates won the Giro d’Italia in dramatic fashion. And as I write, the Women’s Tour of Britain has just finished, won by New Zealander Ally Woolaston, who pushed young British talent Cat Ferguson into second place on the final day.

Of course, you may not care much about cycling. You may never have heard of the names I mentioned above. But one name you will have heard of is that of Sir Chris Hoy.

Hoy is one of Great Britain’s most successful Olympians, with six gold medals and one silver medal in track cycling. Since retiring in 2013, he has also competed in motorsport events, including the famous 24 Heures du Mans.

But his latest memoir, All That Matters, describes a very different kind of endurance test – that of dealing with terminal cancer.

He writes candidly about how this has affected his whole approach to life. He has learned to slow down, to see life as a gift, to appreciate every moment with his young family.

He has also taught himself to be optimistic, living in the hope that he will be one of the outliers who lives longer than expected on his course of treatment.

But what if it could be even better than that? What if we could know that death was not going to be the end?

The apostle Paul wrote about this hope. In one of the letters he wrote to Christians living in ancient Greece, he says, “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.”

Paul says our current bodies are like tents. They are temporary dwellings which will not last. But God offers us something permanent – an eternal home. This is talking about a new kind of body - an everlasting body - made for an everlasting world.

This is the wonderful hope of Christianity: “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”. It’s one of the reasons that the Christian faith spread so rapidly in cities like ancient Rome, where the average life expectancy of a slave was just over thirty years.

This hope is not just based on wishful thinking. It’s based on the teaching of Jesus, and the accounts of his resurrection. He is the one we need if we want to know such great hope.