Nieuwe Kerk, Delft

Submitted by Alan Marsden on Fri, 18/07/2025 - 00:00

The Nieuwe Kerk of the Dutch city of Delft is not dissimilar to London’s Westminster Abbey at Windsor’s St George’s Chapel in its function of housing the tombs of the royal family. Queens Juliana and Wilhemina lay there, as well as various princes of Orange, with the exception of William III, who, being also King of England, was interred at Westminster. It is not only royalty and nobility which lie buried in its vaults; heroes like William the Silent are here also, and Hugo Grotius, the great Dutch thinker whom I recall teaching in A-level ethics for his views on Just War Theory. Truly, the great and the good of the Netherlands make this their final resting place.

Of course, the phrase is a nonsense. The unredeemed go to hades where they nervously await sentence, or they are before the throne of the Lamb, more alive than ever they were before. Yet scripture often speaks of the Israelite and Jewish kings going to 'rest with their fathers'. Whether this is a reference to Sheol, the place of the dead to which all were consigned prior to Christ’s atoning work, or whether it refers to the ‘sleeping’ of the body, I am not sure.

Sometimes people ask me where I shall be buried. It won’t be in some lofty cathedral, nor even in the scenic surrounds of Salem Chapel, assuming a normal life expectancy. I am happy enough with the cheapest plot in the commonest cemetery, though I shall not be there to offer assessment. The splendour of the burial really counts for nothing. Those fools who spend hours planning their own funerals but not a single minute preparing their souls to meet the Living God are as dull as they are stupid. The best tombs often contain the biggest fools, and the grandest cathedrals the basest rogues. ‘Laid to rest’ and ‘lying in state’: their corpses, perhaps, but not their spirits.

The New Church perhaps reminds us of the future, resurrected body. The older church, which it somehow replaced or supplemented, was also a fine structure, but the newer one is better. Once again, I marvel at people’s obsession with their current bodies, which are already fading and disintegrating. They cannot keep them, and nor will they last. One day, at the trumpet call, we shall rise again, embodied, some to everlasting life, some to everlasting shame and contempt. The new will become permanent, and the old will be but a dim and distant memory. So look ahead, living today in the light of tomorrow; live in the light of death, and die in the light of Life.