Sunday, June 27, 2021

27 June 2021 - death meddled


God did not make death,
    nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.

The tendency some of us have is to try to make our peace with death too quickly. We try to immediately embrace Sister Death as did Saint Francis. But in doing so we minimize the wrongness and the bitterness of death. We become less sympathetic to others. To simply ignore all of the negative aspects of death in this way is not the same as embracing death like Saint Francis. 

For God formed man to be imperishable;
    the image of his own nature he made him.
But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world,
    and they who belong to his company experience it.

If we want to reach the point where we can have the genuine familiarity and fearlessness toward death as Francis we first need realize that this would be impossible without the way death has been transformed by Jesus. It is not the case the humans were meant to be just one more temporal and decaying aspect of the natural world. We were made to be imperishable. Death was a genuine evil, a victory of the devil over mankind. This is the reason for the pain, not only of sickness and old age, but especially of the separation of loved ones. We do ourselves no service when we simply pretend this was all meant to be. 

“My daughter is at the point of death.
Please, come lay your hands on her
that she may get well and live.”

Jesus did not tell the synagogue official that death was simply a part of nature that he should resign himself to accept. He went with him to heal his daughter. But curiously, he allowed himself to be interrupted. He could, we assume, have allowed the hemorrhaging woman to touch him, be healed, and then continue on his way without spending the time to address her. But he took the time.

Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him,
turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who has touched my clothes?”

Jesus stopped, not because he was indifferent, but rather because he wanted to give this woman a greater grace than mere healing, the grace of encountering him.

He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has saved you.
Go in peace and be cured of your affliction.”

This delay in healing and making himself known to this woman was long enough that the synagogue official's daughter died during the period that he himself was forced to anxiously wait and watch. It must have been excruciating to watch a situation which to his mind must have been of much lower priority.  After all, if she waited twelve years could she not wait another? Could not his daughter be healed first, and then other matters be addressed? But Jesus intentionally chose to do things differently.

Disregarding the message that was reported,
Jesus said to the synagogue official,
“Do not be afraid; just have faith.”

It was only on this far side of the evil of death that the gift of new life could be rightly understood. Had Jesus simply healed the daughter that would have made one statement about his power over disease. But instead Jesus intentionally waited so that he could make a different statement about his power over death. Jesus did not allow the daughter's death because it was, as some argue, natural, or as Jairus may have feared, unimportant to Jesus. The point he wanted to make was that to him raising the dead is as simple as it is for us to wake someone from sleep.

“Why this commotion and weeping?
The child is not dead but asleep.”

And now, finally, we too can have this same attitude. It is an attitude we would not have known if Jesus had simply addressed the symptoms of death as quickly as they arose, if he simply cured sickness and disease without ever addressing the underlying issue. However great of a healer he may have been, it could only have been a temporary fix if death itself was still the inevitable conclusion. And while death is still the likely way we will meet our end if Jesus doesn't return in our lifetime it is not for us the end of the story. We too will hear the sacred words spoken to the child, "Talitha koum."

Moreover, there is a sense in which Jesus already spoke this to us in baptism, saying "little one, I say to you arise!"

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life (see Romans 6:4).

Just as Jesus ordered that the little girl be given something to eat, so too does he order that we be given his own flesh and blood to give us strength. It is from the perspective of this new birth, with faith in his power over death already at work within us, that allows us to meet death as a beloved sister who does not destroy us, but brings us at last into the presence of God.

Jesus changed death from a dead end into a doorway to life by his willingness to take on and embrace our own suffering, including our experience of death. United to him by his love we can now pass through it just as he did, just as Israel once passed through the waters of the Red Sea. Yet we are not now immune to the sorrows of the world still afflicted by death. Rather, we bring to the world our deepest sympathy and most profound compassion. We enter with it into its sorrow so as to bring it through to the other side.

For you know the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ,
that though he was rich, for your sake he became poor, 
so that by his poverty you might become rich.

There is no poverty greater than death without Christ. There are no riches worth more than new life in him. It may seem like we are insufficient to reveal this reality to others, but our abundance is meant to be their supply.

Whoever had much did not have more,
and whoever had little did not have less.


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