May turned out to be a hard month for many of my closest friends, and June doesn't look anymore promising. John's dad's lymphoma came back, and there's nothing the doctors can do: he's in hospice, and it's turned into a waiting game. Not a week later, Isaac's mom was diagnosed with invasive lung cancer. She's on chemo, but the doctors aren't too hopeful. Prayers, obviously, are appreciated, even demanded. I joined Isaac and his brother at the Happy Hollow ("You go in happy, but you leave feeling hollow; I think that's where they get the name?"), and we took shots of all sorts of liquor celebrating their mother. "No one can call me a son of a bitch," Isaac said, "because my mom's just so awesome." I've never met her, but everything I've heard tells me that's the case.
I've thought a lot about death the last year, and especially over the last few weeks. My thoughts always go back to the Fall of Man in Genesis 3. This is why death is here, and this is why it feels like such a violation. Because of our sin in the Garden, we image bearers have become subject to decay and death just like the rest of creation. It isn't so much that we sinned and then death entered the picture; it's more like we sinned, and we became subject to the same laws that apply to the rest of God's creation (look through the fossil record: death's there, through and through, part of God's good creation). We've acquired bodies like that of the animals, subject to the forces of nature. It isn't just that earthquakes and tornadoes can kill us: we're also susceptible to disease, to prions, to cancer. We sought to become gods, but now we rot and die like the animals. It feels like such a violation because this isn't how things are supposed to be. And so I praise God for the gospel: those who are in Christ never die, we simply change.
The story of the gospel doesn't start at the cross but in the Garden. God makes mankind in his image, sets him in the Garden with the command to rule over the world and fill the earth. Mankind wants to become like God, and the end result is what N.T. Wright calls dehumanization: we become like the animals. We become subject to death and decay. This isn't just a spiritual death, a spiritual decay; it's all-encompassing. All of our human experience is scarred. We face the same fate as the animals: we live, we rot, we die, we're gone. But God doesn't wish for this to be the case, so he does something about it. He sends Christ, to bring about the great work of redemption, to inaugurate and seal God's mission of rescuing and renewing the world. This rescue and renewal starts with humankind, since we're God's prized possession. In Romans 6-8, Paul offers us a panoramic view of this salvation: in Romans 6 we're dead and sin, then raised to newness of life in Christ. We're new creations, and we need to start living like it. We're not like the pagans, who seek to honor God but can't. We have God's Spirit, and the Spirit works in us and for us, reworking our hearts and minds, bringing us all the more closer to who we truly are as God's image bearers. This rescue isn't complete, for even now we groan with all creation, yearning for "the hope of the glory of God," which is no less than God's final intent for his world: a full and final rescue. Human beings who have been "saved" aren't simply saved from hell to enjoy some sort of ethereal heavenly experience. We're saved from ourselves, from our dehumanization, and we're returned to our rightful place in the cosmos. Paul calls this glorification, and it is the hope of the Christian, when we will be revealed as God's adopted children.
Those without the hope of Christ grieve absent hope of ever seeing their loved ones again. Paul says immortality is a gift of God; those who die without that gift go the way of the animals: extinction. For the Christian, this life is but a breath before the rest of our existence. For those absent Christ, this life is all there is. In Christ there's freedom from having to experience it all before we die. We know that our time here is brief, to be lived for God's glory and in preparation for the world to come. In Christ there's hope, for we know that through all life's trials and heartaches, this world is not our home. Here we're sojourners and aliens. Those outside Christ die, and we celebrate the life that has ended; those in Christ go home and we celebrate not only the lives they lived but also the lives they're beginning.
Jesus didn't raise a lot of people from the dead. Really, he only resurrected three people: the widow's son at Nain, Jairus' daughter, and Lazarus. Such a sign and testament to Jesus' identity and mission, why didn't he do it more? It seems incredible to us, but those who are tasting paradise get the sludge end of the deal.
There's so much death and suffering in the world, and like all theists, I ask, "Where is God?" I've been praying about this a lot, for those who are Christian suffer no more or less than those who aren't. As it says in the Bible, the same rains fall on the just and unjust. The simple truth is that we can't expect God to deliver us from an untimely death, to deliver us from these bodies subject to decay and death. In his wisdom God has enacted a two-part rescue operation, and we're in the first stages: we're saved, but not yet. We still must face the cost of our rebellion, that of decaying and dying. But though death is awful, it isn't the end for the Christian. Paul has the nerve to ask, "Death, where is your sting?" Christ was bold enough to say that those in him never die: perhaps, just maybe, at the moment of death, there is a seamless transition into paradise. We in Christ don't cease to be; we just go someplace else. My mom's told the story about being at the bedside of a dear family member taking her last breaths. The woman's eyes lit up, a smile crossed her face, and the fear was replaced with peace; she took my mother's hand, and she told her that angels were in the room, that everything was okay, Jesus was there and she wasn't scared. She drew her last breath and was gone. Not extinct, just elsewhere, and she didn't seem too upset about it right before she made the plunge.
We see our lives as all there is. Our lives begin at conception, we draw our first breaths, and this world of death and decay is all we know. We're told that there's more, but we have no proof of it. It's hard not to see this life as all there is, because it's all we know. But I wonder, if we only knew what waits for us when our bodies cease to function, we may not be so disturbed by it. While in high school, I prayed so hard for months on end to just catch a glimpse of paradise, as Paul did. One night I went to bed and closed my eyes and then woke up and it was morning. This was weird, because (a) I always have vivid dreams, and I had none that night that I could recall, and (b) there was no sense of the passage of time: I just closed my eyes around 11 PM and it seemed in the next instant it was 5:30 AM with my alarm going off. I thought nothing of it and went to school, and later that day my mom asked me, "What was so beautiful?" I had no idea what she was talking about. She told me she went into my room around midnight to check on me, as she always did, and I was curled up in bed with a big smile on my face and my cheeks aglow, and I kept saying, "It's so beautiful, it's so beautiful..." Those who know me know how skeptical I am, but I have to be honest: I really do think God answered my prayer, that I caught a glimpse of paradise,
At the Happy Hollow the other night, Isaac told me his mom has peace.
She knows death isn't the end of her story. She knows this world isn't her home.
She doesn't see death as the end of her life, but as a transitional stage.
I want her courage, her strength, and her confidence in the face of her greatest trial yet.
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