Texts:
Isaiah 25.6-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21.1-6a; John 11.32-44
Because I could not stop for
Death,
he kindly stopped for me.
There is something arresting about these lines from Emily
Dickinson. When read out loud, they send
a shock-wave through one’s body because their subject is . . . death. Death, that shadow, that reality which so
many of us would rather avoid thinking about.
Death, that end to all our powers, that blind assassin of achievements,
whether they be evil or good, lies or truth.
Death, that destroyer of suburban dreams, that terrifying democrat who
respects neither our station in life nor the tapestries of intimacy we weave
therein. Death is indeed one whose
piercing gaze we would rather not countenance.
The truth is that few of us have any time for death. We are busy.
We would rather not stop. And yet . . .
isn’t it strange that Dickinson speaks of death’s ‘kindness’ in choosing
to stop for her? How could death ever be regarded as kind?
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking of that paradigm example of
modernity called medicine, and its unfortunate practise of keeping a person
breathing when they’d rather slip away, that brand of so-called ‘care’ which
insists on keeping our bodies alive, when, at the same time, our deepest spirit
longs for nothing else but quiet, peace, and an end to the pain. Many of you will have stared this experience
in the face. And many of you will have
recoiled in horror, and prayed earnestly that God would grant the kindness of death, a death which comes,
quietly, to liberate a loved one from the coils of despairing mortality. In circumstances such as these, death can
indeed be seen as a kindness. But this
morning I would like to push us beyond circumstances such as these, and explore
a far more difficult proposition. Might there be a sense in which death as
such, any death and every death, might actually be regarded as a gift from God?
Death as a gift. The idea
just seems so contradictory,
especially if you’ve been raised, like me, in the Christian church! Because so much of our theology seems to
regard death as the enemy. And with good cause. I think of the story of Adam and Eve’s
expulsion from the garden of Eden. For
many years I imagined that human beings were created immortal by God, and that
death came into the world as a form of punishment for our pride, our believing
that we could be like God. Emphasis on
the word punishment. And that is
certainly one way to read the story . . .
if you want to ignore the following details. That Adam and Eve were not created immortal, and that their expulsion from the garden of
Eden is effected so that they will never eat of the ‘tree of life’ and become immortal. In the actual Genesis story, as opposed to
the imagined one, the expulsion from the garden is not a punishment, but a
measure to ensure that the plan for human beings continues according to God’s intention. And that intention explicitly includes
mortality. Death.
But what of that other famous passage in 1 Corinthians 15, where
the apostle Paul speaks of death as the ‘last great enemy’ that God will
overcome? Indeed, how can we Christians not see death as the enemy, if we
believe that God wills that our ‘mortal bodies put on immortality’, that our
fleshly bodies become ‘spiritual bodies’, as Paul says? Today’s reading from Isaiah would seem to
echo that sentiment as well. There the
prophet describes death as the ‘shroud’, the ‘sheet of sorrow’ that covers the
people, and promises that God will ‘swallow up death forever’. And again, in Revelation, the writer imagines
a ‘new heaven and a new earth’ in which death, along with sorrow and pain, have
been done away with forever. Surely,
then, death is not part of the plan
of God. Surely it can only be seen as an enemy to be done away
with: the last enemy; the last, and greatest, evil.
Again, it is possible to read the story that way if you are happy
to do away with the more subtle character of the narratives in question. It is important to notice, in Paul for
example, that while death will ultimately be done away with, in the meantime it
performs a crucially important function. For Paul, death is the indispensable
means by which we put aside our own will to make room for the will of
Christ. By our baptism we are buried
with Christ in death, so that we may be raised to a life no longer controlled
by the desires of our own egos, but by Christ.
Now this is very important. Here
the ordinary, ‘common-sense’, understanding of death is subjected to a radical
deconstruction, a veritable transfiguration.
No longer is death simply death, the cessation of consciousness, of
life, of biological functioning. No, death is also a radical decentring of
personality, an act of the will by which, paradoxically, desire and personal
ambition are done away with so that
the desires and ambitions of God might take up residence in that very same
personality. Here death is indispensible
to what John of the Cross called the ‘dark night of the soul’, the profoundly disturbing
loss of all that one thinks or knows or feels in order to make room for that
which is unthought, unknown, and unfelt . . .
for God, who is all that we are not.
Death, then, is a gift in this sense. By coming to the end of our powers, we make
room in our lives for the power of God.
By coming to the end of our knowing, we make room in our minds for the
knowing of God. By coming to the end of
our desire, we make room in our hearts for the desire of God. By coming to the end of our capacity for
peace, we make room in our hearts for the peace of God. If the coming of God in any of these ways is
a good thing, then death may be seen as a gift.
Indeed, one might even say that death is God’s gift of grace for all who
would be released into the radically new way of being alive which we call being
‘in Christ’. And while I believe that my
actual and final death will also be my passage to God, I also believe that in
meditating upon the fact of my death right now, while I’m alive, I might be
persuaded to die a little now, and so become more fully alive than I have ever
been before.
Thomas Merton once prayed with these words. I’d like to make them my own today, in honour
of the saints who have lived and died before us, and who model for us the way
to salvation:
My
hope is in what the eye has never seen.
Therefore, let me not trust in visible rewards. My hope is in what human hearts can never
feel. Therefore let me not trust in the
feelings of my heart. My hope is in what
human hands have never touched. Do not
let me trust what I can grasp between my fingers. Death will loosen my grasp and my vain hope
will be gone.[1]
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