Death
Lord, What Are Human Beings: Death
Swanbourne 14.3.21 Lent 4
St Paul calls death our ‘the last enemy’. But is this so any more? Perhaps we no longer frightened of death like the people of the first-century AD when Paul was writing his letters. Is it a case that, thanks to advances in medicine, and the increasing wealth of modern societies, and the loss of belief in divine judgement causing fear of hell, that death is no longer an enemy? That now death is understood to be just a part of living and we accept it, albeit reluctantly?
The spiritual writer Henri Nouwen wrote about such acceptance of death when we watched a burial by farmers of County Donegal in Ireland.
The priest and a few men carried the humble coffin to the cemetery. After the coffin was put into the grave, the men filled the grave with sand and covered it again with patches of grass which had been laid aside. Two men stamped with their boots on the sod so that it was hardly possible to know that this was the grave. Then one of the two men took two pieces of wood, bound them together in the form of a cross and stuck it in the ground. Everyone made a quick sign of the cross and left silently. No words, no solemnity, no decoration. Nothing of that . . . It has never been made so clear to me that someone was dead, not asleep but dead, not passed away but dead, not laid to rest but dead, plain dead. When I saw those two men stamping on the ground in which they had buried their friend, I knew that for these farmers of Donegal there were no funeral-home games to play.
I know what he means by funeral games; the various ways in which we avoid facing the real tragedy of death. When I was a young priest and most people were buried not cremated, the piles of earth by the grave were covered over by sheets of plastic, bright green, fake grass. The dead are dressed up and made up for their grieving relatives in a viewing that disguises the dead body. Funerals are full of what are referred to as ‘celebrations of life’; and even the Church colludes with this by priests wearing white, the colour of the most festive of our holy days, rather than the traditional purple of grief and judgement.
Beyond funerals, there is much in our society to suggest that death is still very much the old great enemy that St Paul thought it was. If we had any confident thoughts about us conquering the fear of death they have certainly been dealt a body blow by the COVID-19 pandemic. Just take Perth. One case of infection was enough to cause the state government to lockdown half the state, including the whole city of Perth, for five days; and once again we saw the familiar panic buying of toilet paper and other necessities at the supermarket as people rushed to look after themselves first and foremost. All this and much much more for an infection that is far less deadly compared with Ebola or the Spanish Influenza pandemic after World War One, or the Black Death of the fourteenth century that wiped out nearly a third of European population. No, the fear of death of just as real for us in the wealthy, medically well-endowed society of Australia as it has ever been in human history.
But not only do we fear death as much as ever, we have at the same time embraced it as a solution for our most personal problems at the beginning and end of life and in-between. We have become a death-dealing society. No one would dispute that abortion is about killing life, though some would dispute that the life of a foetus might be termed potential rather than actual. Though whether we would term a foetus in the final trimester before birth as not human is less debateable. However, as abortion has moved from becoming a justifiable, if morally difficult, act in order to save a mother’s life, to being a form of contraception babies are aborted in the last weeks of pregnancy, Fully-formed little human bodies are dismembered in the womb. At the other end of life our society have chosen to legalise suicide for the terminally ill rather than investing far more heavily in palliative care. Down that road have gone others before us in WA. In the Netherlands it now legal, with special provisions, for death to be administered to persons between 12 and 18 who request it; and it is thought there are as many unreported as reported cases of legalised suicide. Those coming after us in Queensland have a bill on the matter that is considerably weaker and more ambiguous in its restrictions for legal suicide than here in WA or Victoria.
Death also pervades our society between birth and death in the form of the drug culture, and as apocalyptic warnings of the end of the world by climate change activists and others that would put to shame any firebrand preacher. Drugs have filled homes and families with the deaths of loved ones high on their drug of choice, lately methamphetamines which are now the cause of many of murders committed in our society. Children live in fear that global death and the end of the world is about happen in global warming, so that some young people even take their own lives as this outlook adds the meaninglessness and anxiety of young lives already far too burdened with politicised messages.
So it seems clear to me that what St Paul wrote to his fellow Christians in the first century is just as true and significant for human beings today. The last enemy for human life to flourish and needing to be dealt with is still death.
While most of us would choose to live rather than die (all things being equal), many are also afraid that all life may finally have to offer is death. Even after a successful career, with a comfortable home, secure and respectable job, travel, wide cultural experience, and perhaps even a contribution to the enrichment of human civilization through art or science; even after all that and more, many fear that death and nonexistence is the end of all of us. As Cardinal Hume of Westminster once put it: "The world gives quick returns but these are cheated by death. For those whose only preoccupation is to seek pleasure and fame and success, death is the final and greatest tragedy." So because many people have more than sneaking suspicion that the final human end is to lie rotting in the ground or in scattered ashes they hide that fear of death behind imitation grass and thoughts of falling asleep, or even more vaguely ‘passing’, as though death were a guaranteed ticket to somewhere, they know not what.
Consequently, as death brings us to our end and for any lover is a tragedy, therefore God who created us for himself in an on-going act of love had to deal with it.
The witness of the original followers of Jesus, and of the Church since, is that Jesus defeated tbs enemy of death in a real and authentic way. But if that were all we might simply wish to say well hooray for Jesus but what about me? However, that original witness to the resurrection of Jesus emphatically claims that what was true for him also holds true for his followers. Jesus has led the way, he was the first, but only so that others could follow his path to life. So St Paul reflected, ‘As in Adam all mortals die, so in Christ all will be brought to life; but each in his own proper place; Christ the first-fruits, and afterwards, at his coming, those who belong to Christ.’ Resurrection life is promised to all who follow Jesus. That promise is not made to those who do not follow, but that is God’s business not ours. Our business is to live out our faith and hope in the eternal life promised us by Christ Jesus and guaranteed in his resurrection from the dead.
It is not that death has been taken away, for Christ also truly died. Just like us and that Donegal farmer Jesus died on Good Friday. Dead. The end. But the witness handed down since then is that, unlike the usual human story, that was not the end for Jesus and the tomb could not keep him past the third day. Not only was he made alive again, but to alive in a new and glorified existence. It wasn’t that life was simply restored to Jesus’s old body, for if that is all it was then he would simply have had to die again. The original witnesses to the resurrection is that Jesus, by the power of God his Father, rose to a new and wondrous mode of existence which was a complete manifestation of the divine life of God. The earliest witness we have - St. Paul - struggles to describe that indescribable reality of Jesus’s new and unique life that will be ours also as his followers. ‘Flesh and blood can never possess the kingdom of God, and the perishable cannot possess immortality. Listen! I shall unfold a mystery: we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye . . . and the dead will rise immortal, and we shall be changed.’
Nor is this just some fantasy or wish-fulfilment acted out by the first followers of Jesus and continued by generations of Christians ever since. Now as an historian I understand that there are difficulties with the evidence to this event in the extant record of the New Testament. I would not wish to assert that the resurrection of Jesus is a claim that can be proved beyond doubt by history. The resurrection is fundamentally a claim of faith not entirely verifiable by fact alone.
However, while we believe by faith we also believe with some genuine basis in history for the resurrection of our Lord Christ Jesus. It is difficult otherwise to account for the reversal in the fear of the Twelve disciples, and the willingness of some of them to die for their faith in Christ Jesus. Some the New Testament documents were written within the same generation, or just one removed, of the events they purport to witness to. While there are discrepancies in those documents there are also striking similarities that are textually independent of each other. The earliest of all the documents about the resurrection, the accounts in Paul's letter to the Corinthian Church, is actually comparatively close to the events, probably within twenty years, and written by a follower who was initially a militant opponent of Christians. Certainly that is within a date when the other witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus that Paul speaks of were alive and could independently witness to the accuracy of Paul's account. So our faith in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is not in flagrant contradiction of reason. There is a genuine degree of rational substance in the claim of faith in the resurrection of Jesus. It cannot, as some contemporary atheist writers claim, be simply dismissed as a complete fantasy of Christians wanting to vindicate Jesus, or us Christians comforting ourselves about death by a claim that can be disproved.
So what does an acceptance by faith and reason of the resurrection of Jesus mean for us in the present? It is a genuine means by which we can tackle our fear of death and finally overcome it. We may still fear the pain of dying. We may perhaps fear losing our faith in Jesus and his resurrection in the face of death. However, with such faith in Christ Jesus we do not any longer have to persist in hiding our fears of death behind false immortalities. The false immortalities of perpetual life through our children that makes impossible demands of them, expecting them to be replicas of ourselves rather than their own persons. The false immortality of our own achievements that often is too threatened to affirm the achievements of others. Instead, the Christian knows he or she will surely die but just as surely live because of Christ. We can be free of these false immortalities and, therefore, freed of their impossible burdens we can live as ourselves and be joyful. We can live amidst a pandemic, both as individual Christians and as a church, with a confidence in God through Christ Jesus that does not fear death. We can do this by insisting on our public worship as a risk we are willing to take, and by meeting the needs of others even at some risk to ourselves. We may do this because, while death remains our enemy, we know it has been conquered by our Lord Christ Jesus as God’s solution to our last great enemy.
Faith in our Lord Christ Jesus and in his resurrection can and does enable us to endure the very worst that death can do to us in this life, not easily but with real living hope. With the resurrection, the new life of victory over sin and death has indeed begun. But at the same time Christ’s victory has yet to be totally fulfilled. Christians therefore live in a tension between the in-breaking of the kingdom of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and its ultimate fulfilment. Christ has risen, but we are still rising. So St Paul in his great discourse on the resurrection in I Cor.15 can point to a final fulfilment - ‘for as in Adam all die, so in Christ will all be made alive’ (15:22). New life is ours but we are also in a process of appropriating this gift of resurrection-life all our lives. We have both received this gift of resurrection-life but have as yet to receive its fullness.
Bernhard Lichtenberg was a Catholic priest in Berlin. He had been a chaplain with the German army in World War One. Ever since 1938 when Nazi thugs had burned Jewish synagogues and destroyed Jewish business premises, he had ended the evening services in his church with a prayer ‘for the Jews, and the poor prisoners in the concentration camps’. In October 1941 Bernard Lichtenberg was finally arrested. He was sentenced to two years and sent to the notorious Dachau concentration. However, he died ‘on the way’ to the camp according to the official report. (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: a Jewish tragedy (1986), 216,) Such a Christian action in the face of death by someone who could have remained safe is perhaps baffling to many - it doesn’t make sense according to the values of the world. But Father Lichtenberg lived and died by the values of Jesus’s life and his Kingdom of God and in the hope of resurrection because of Jesus his Lord. As we shall say for the first time for two years at the Easter Vigil - Christ is Risen!
Topics for Discussion
1. Is death still as much a fear in our society as the sermon claims?
2. In what ways does Jesus’ resurrection feature in your Christian faith?
3. Does faith in Jesus’ resurrection help you to face death?
4. Are the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection in the New Testament believable?