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We remember the line from Shakespeare's Macbeth: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more." This refers, of course, to the life of the actor or the dramatist. What's the assessment? "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

The image we get from that statement is that of a person who is in the limelight, in the spotlight, for a brief interlude of life, and then suddenly is silenced. The sentiment of this idea is that if this is the final conclusion to human existence, the story of life is an idiot's tale. An idiot is someone who is irrational, who doesn't make sense. An idiot is on the rim of madness, and the tales that he tells are not credible stories. They may be filled with sound and fury, with noise and passion. They may be loud and moving. But what do they signify? Nothing.

I think the meaning of life is the great existential question that every human being faces at death. I'll never forget the day that my son was born. I stood in the hospital and looked down at my firstborn son.

I knew that my life was irrevocably changed. All relationships would now be different. I remember that occasion vividly because, when I went back to the hospital that evening, I took my mother to see her grandson. She was absolutely ecstatic about him, and when we got home, she said, "This is the happiest day of my life."

The next morning, I was awakened by my daughter calling to my mother. She came into my room and said, "Grandma won't wake up." As I walked into my mother's room, I realized that she was dead; she had died in her sleep. It was one of those weird, uncanny moments of human experience. It seemed to me that just moments before I had heard my mother say, "This is the happiest day of my life." She was a living, breathing, caring, passionate human being. Now she was lying lifeless in her bed. The previous morning, I had seen the newness of life with the birth of my son. On the same day that my son was born, my mother died. So I had an experience of the conflict between life and death. As I stood there, I said: "This doesn't make sense. Death doesn't make sense." Every fiber in my being said to me, "This cannot be the final conclusion for human experience."

My response could be explained away as an emotional need in my soul to believe that life is meaningful, but I was thinking in these terms: If God exists, this cannot be the end. That's what Jesus is saying to his disciples when he says, "Do not let your hearts be troubled."

When I stood beside my mother in that room, my heart was troubled—deeply troubled. But Jesus says: "Don't allow that. If you believe in God, believe also in me." And immediately upon making this connection between faith in the Father and faith in him, Jesus says, "My Father's house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?"

Do you hear what Jesus is saying to his disciples? As he approaches the moment of his death, he says to them: "Trust me. Trust the Father. He has a huge house with many rooms in it." And he says, "If this were not so, if this were just fantasy, if this were just emotional wish projection, if this were a fairytale or human superstition, I wouldn't have told you this."

Keep in mind that if Jesus Christ is God incarnate, he is the greatest theologian who ever walked the planet. He doesn't make theological mistakes, nor does he approve of theological error. He would not allow his disciples to go through the rest of their lives holding to a belief that was false. He says: "Your hope for life after death is not groundless. It is not a false hope. If it were a false hope, I would have told you. I would have corrected it."