Kerry Packer

Kerry Packer, whom I hadn’t previously thought of as a theologian, said at the time of his 1990 heart attack, when he was pronounced clinically dead for eight minutes, "The good news is there's no devil. The bad news is there's no heaven. There's nothing." This piece of information was played back after the news report today of his (very private) funeral.

Well, the good news is that now he’ll know whether he was actually right. The bad news, for him, anyway, is that he may have been totally wrong.

Elsewhere it was stated that he was making a million dollars a day out of his investments, business interests and so on. Pity that none of it will do him any good where he’s gone – wherever he’s gone.

On the basis of my understanding, he’ll stand, like everyone else, before God Almighty, and have to account for his life. I wonder if being a ‘brash, swashbuckling businessman with a voracious appetite for gambling, both in the boardroom and in the casino’ will be deemed as a worthwhile way to have spent his life. Or the fact that he revived the game of cricket: will God be interested in this, I wonder?

Let’s hope Mr Packer was secretly giving away some of those daily millions to the poor and needy. That would help him a little.