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Good morning.
I never had any real interest in the singer Michael Jackson but I can still remember quite vividly the circumstances in which I was told of his sudden death by someone at a bus stop outside Central Station in Belfast who had just received the news by text 6 years ago today.
Again I can visualize myself looking over someone’s shoulder on a stifling bus in Croatia in 1977 reading the headline ELVIS E MORTE
I could say the same about the death of Princess Diana and while it might be over half a century since John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas the very thought takes me directly to an over furnished front room in a Dublin student lodging over 50 years, but all still as lucid as ever.
Maybe this is why I have never had any problem with the fact that 30 years elapsed before our written records of Jesus appeared - Jesus, a man years younger than any of those mentioned, and who died an extremely public and violent death – 
Here are accounts originating in those closest to him, whose souls and consciousness had been so seared by all that they had seen that awful day.
No wonder then that so many of their memories should focus ONLY on that last week in Jerusalem - in one case a third of the whole Gospel
No wonder that we find in it, a certain ring of truth causing our imaginations to take us to an upper room a sombre garden or to a hillside we look up in wonder at a lonely taunted figure on a cross.
Lord for those indelible memories of your Son, in life and death, we give you thanks. 
Amen.