The gift of death

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.

If all that is difficult to take in, then listen again to the story of the death and raising of Lazarus.  Except, this time, listen not so much for the events of the story, but for the theological images  evoked by Lazarus’ death.  Can you hear Jesus say that, by Lazarus’ death, the glory of God will arrive? . . .   Can you hear him say that, with this death, there is an end to knowing and a beginning to believing? . . .   Can you hear Thomas say ‘Let us go with Jesus, that we may die with him also’?  . . .   This whole story imagines death, not just as the cessation of life, but as the occasion of salvation.  By the death of Lazarus, all concerned engage the reality of their own deaths as well.  In weeping, they experience the death of their ‘seeing’, which, for the Greeks, was a cipher for knowledge.  According to John, God cannot be known in the same way as we know other things.  Indeed, it is only when we are prepared to lose our capacity to ‘know’ that we may see God’s glory.  Only when we die to ourselves, may we rise to God, and find our true selves.

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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[1] Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, New York, Noonday Press, 1958, p.39

For God Everything is Possible

Job 23.1-9, 16-17; Psalm 22; Hebrews 4.12-16; Mark 10.17-31

 
No matter whether we are rich or we are poor, there comes a time for many of us when we awake to discover that we are without what matters most, we are without God.

Job was a man who was very rich in every way. He owned land, and goods. But he was also rich in the joys of family, whom he loved and they him. He was also rich, it seems, in what might be called ‘moral goods’ or, in middle-class speak, ‘brownie points’. He was renowned for his honesty in business dealings and his charity to those in need. Yet it was not until all of this was taken from him that he came to see that although he possessed all things, he did not possess God. Let me quote from chapter 23 of the book that bears Job’s name:

If only I knew where to find God; if only I could go to his dwelling . . . But if I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him. 

The rich young man who comes to Jesus in the story from Mark’s gospel is in many ways the same as Job. He is a wealthy man when it comes to lands and goods. But he, too, is wealthy in the ways of the moral law. ‘All these commandments I have kept since I was a boy’ he tells Jesus. Yet, despite his wealth in all these things, he comes to Jesus because he is aware that something is missing. ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ he asks. The rich young man is different to Job in that he still, at the point we encounter him here, possesses his material wealth. Yet he is the same as Job in possessing his integrity, his moral uprightness. And he is the same as Job is what he does not, apparently, possess: God. For that is what ‘eternal life’ apparently meant for this young man. To possess all that God possesses. To ‘inherit’ the very life of God that can never be lost or stolen away. To possess such life as God possesses it: absolutely, and without any danger of loss or corruptibility.

So. Whether we are rich or poor, for many of us there comes a time when we awake to discover that we are without what matters most, we are without God. I say ‘for many of us’ because I am aware that there are a great many people today who never come to this awareness at all. That is not to say that there are not a great many existential crises out there. They are everywhere! It is simply to say that the emptiness a great many of us feel is rarely understood, anymore, to be about the lack of God. For most, their existential crises are about a seeping away of meaningfulness in what we do each day, but that is about as far as the analysis gets. That a loss of meaning may also signal a lack of God is something that Christians and Jews and Muslims can talk about, because we live inside a language and culture – a ‘house of being’ as Heidegger said – which names what human beings need more than anything else by the name of ‘God’. God is the name to which all names point, the desired which all desires ultimately allude to. God is the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field, the one thing necessary to life in all its fullness.

So, for we Christians, the experience of awaking to God’s apparent absence can be a very scary thing indeed. If we do not feel God’s presence and experience God’s blessing, then what is life worth? If God seems to have disappeared from the stage, then what are we to conclude? That God doesn’t care for us, or that God is dead? Or perhaps Professors Freud and Dawkins are right: God does not exist, God is no more than a cultural construct, a product of our needy, infantile, imaginations? Well, in the face of the experience to which we refer, that is indeed one way to proceed. But it is somewhat reductionist, and it suffers from the precisely the kind of cultural captivity that it accuses the believer of having – in this case, a rather unquestioning acceptance of the culture of modernity. Furthermore, it is not my way. My way is interested in what the scriptures have to say about the matter.

What today’s scriptures have to say about the experience of God’s disappearance or absence can be summarised in two ways. First, that the experience of God’s absence is more apparent than real. For both Job and the rich young man had over-identified God with the world of things and of achievements, that is, with those dimensions of life one may possess or use or control. In both cases, it was the loss of the same that brought on the crisis: in the case of Job, an actual loss; for the rich young man, the fear of such loss. For when Jesus invites the young man to sell all he has and give it to the poor, he turns away. Clearly he cannot see that possessing eternal life, possessing God, is something rather different to possessing or using or controlling things. For God cannot be possessed or used or controlled like material goods or brownie points can be possessed and used and controlled. The Jewish and Christian tradition about idolatry makes this clear. If we identify God with such things, then we have not identified God. We have created an idol instead – a false god which is not God but merely an extension of ourselves. And this is what Job and the rich young man had done. They had made their possessions and their achievements their god, and thus when these things were lost (or, in the case of the young man, when Jesus suggests that they ought to be lost) they also lose their god. Instant existential crisis ensues.

This loss of God is therefore more apparent than real. When we over-identify God with a comfortable, easy, life where things go pretty much the way we would like them to go, then the loss of such things can feel like the loss of God. But it is not. Indeed, for much of the Christian tradition, the loss or (more positively) the refusal of such things is, in fact, the precondition of really finding God. Or, to put it another way (and here we are moving into the second of our summaries) the de-identification of God with what we can possess or use or control becomes the first step in a path which realises that it is not God who is present to us, on our terms and according to our desires, but God who is present to us, under God’s terms and according to God’s desires.

Listen at what Job starts to understand in the wake of his losses: ‘But God knows the way that I take; when God has tested me, I shall come forth as gold’. And listen to what Jesus says to his disciples after the young man has turned away: ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God . . . With humankind this is indeed impossible, but for God all things are possible’. What is being taught us, in both instances, is this: that God desires to find us, even when we have apparently lost God. In the love of God, it is God’s desire that through such losses we shall discover that it is not God whom we have lost, but only the idols that keep us from God; that God can do in us and for us what we could not, in a million years, do in and for ourselves: create in us the life that is only God’s to give, the life that is full of joy, and peace and healing, a spring that quenches our thirst and a bread that finally satisfies. So there is an indispensable passage that all of us must pass through if we are to find the life that God is always near to give, a passage that St John of the Cross called the ‘dark night of the soul’ and Mark’s gospel calls, simply, ‘taking up one’s cross’. It is about the putting away of idols and the surrendering of our need to possess and use and control every damned thing.

Lest this all seem too hard, remember that God himself has walked this way before us in the person of Jesus Christ. In Christ the figure of Job as the innocent sufferer comes to its genuine fulfillment. The letter to the Hebrews speaks of him as one who became in every way like his human brothers and sisters, a high priest tempted in every way like us, and experiencing the apparent abandonment of God just as we do. The appearance of Psalm 22 in today’s lectionary is a reminder of this. But it reminds us, also, that Christ did not give up his faith in the one true God, any more than the Psalmist did. He continued to trust himself to the one who saves the wretched, finally surrendering himself into his Father’s hands and forging a path for we, as fellow human beings, to imitate and follow. So, in Christ, we know God as who knows the experience of the loss of ‘God’ from the inside. God is therefore a sympathetic God, a God who knows our weakness and encourages us to keep on walking by faith.

In fact, according to Mark there are consolations for the people of God who are able to surrender their idols to God. Listen to what Jesus says to those disciples who were willing to leave everything else in order to follow him:

Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age - houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions - and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first. 

According to Mark, whomever has surrendered their false gods – whether material wealth or a certain kind of righteousness in the eyes of our families or peers – will receive them back again in an even greater measure. Not, this time, as a reward that necessarily follows from our righteousness or hard work. Not this time as those things that can be mistaken for God but which are really just extensions of our own desire. No, following the renunciations of the ‘dark night’ they can be finally received as the gifts of sheer grace that they really are. Gifts to enjoy and give thanks for. Not things to possess and use and control. Gifts to be held lightly and to share liberally with our neighbours in the spirit of the grace which they now represent. So take heart. God is not dead or departed. God is near to give us his very self. And that is everything, everything that God can give!

Garry Deverell