Death is a Catastrophe
As we continue on in this season of Lent, drawing ever closer to the Friday we call good, and that blessed Easter morn; it is good for us to remember the words associated with Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, "Remember that you are dust. From dust you came and to dust you will return." It is said that unless Jesus returns, one out of one of us will die. Some of you are very aware of this as you tread the valley either with a loved one or for yourself. I was recently struck by reflections of former US Senator Ben Sasse, a strong Christian, who was recently diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and is not expected to live long. He has given a couple of interviews and even started his own podcast, doing his best to "redeem the time" that he has left. One or all of these may be worth an hour of your time.*
Situations like that of Sasse, and many others that we are all too familiar with remind us, not only that we will all die, but that death is an enemy. I like how these words from Every Moment Holy, Volume II: Death, Grief, & Hope remind us that death is a catastrophe:
to spin it as but one more spoke
upon a “wheel of life” is to ignore
the groaning cry of all your creatures, O Christ.
Death is a catastrophe, an obscene enemy,
a poisoned arrow piercing the eye of creation,
twisting history and nations, bereaving lovers,
warping the constellations of community,
Death is not natural, not our deaths, the death of our aging parents, certainly not the death of friends who are taken too young, not the death of children, not even the death of Jesus. We don't call that Friday good, because what happened was good in some wholistic sort of way. But the death of Jesus was necessary in order that the price of God's wrath against sin (i.e. death) might be satisfied. In that sense it was good that Jesus went to the cross.
But how can we contemplate such a catastrophe without falling into unending despair? The answer is the resurrection of Jesus. This fact, that Peter and John attest to in our scripture for this coming Sunday (Acts 4:1-22), does not only give us a lens through which we might examine death, but it gives us a lens through which to view the world. The Christian theologian Lesslie Newbigin was once asked if he was an optimist or a pessimist about the world at his time. Newbigin responded: "I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.” For Newbigin, it wasn't that feelings about the state of his life and the world didn't matter, but the facts of Jesus' life, death and resurrection interpreted his feelings and gave him hope!
* Ben Sasse podcast episodes: Ben Sasse on Life, Cancer and the Gospel, Ben Sasse on Mortality, Meaning, and the Future of America