The Wrong Way
The right way is from death to life. That is the direction taken by Christ our Passover: he moves from death to life. It is also the direction of creation. When God creates us, he brings us into existence, he moves us from non-being into being.
Now, it is paradoxical to say that we could “be” in non-being, because “non-being” is precisely and by definition a state in which there is no being. The sentence, “I didn’t exist before I was conceived,” means only that in the universe prior to that happy moment when I was conceived there was no person who had the name “Victor Lee Austin, born on such-a-date in Oklahoma City to such-and-such parents.” That is to say, the pronoun in the sentence “I didn’t exist” does not mean there was an “I” that at that time did not exist. If I didn’t exist, then there was no “I.”
Similarly, since death is a movement into non-being, there is no “I” in death, no “me” to which I could point and say: “There I am, in non-being.”
No, the right direction is to move into life, not out of it. Nonetheless, every day, each of us is moving the other way. Our bodies, by being used, move towards being used up. We might get stronger, we might learn a new skill, but the trajectory is that weakness also comes upon us, as does forgetfulness and many other things that characterize the movement from life to death. We are alive, but we won’t be alive forever.
So I think we can say: human life moves the wrong way. Still, there is no alternative route for us to choose; there is no magic that can turn around “the aging process.” We can lessen or even eliminate some diseases, we can perhaps make our cellular decomposition slower than normal. But we cannot stop the aging process, and it is probably a good thing that we can’t, given our general egoism and everything else that goes into sin. Nonetheless, even though it is inevitable, our pathway through life to death is not the “right” direction, not the direction ultimately taken by Jesus.
Jesus went through life to death. But he then went from death to life.
That reversal, the greatest reversal in human history, is something that awaits each of us. By going through our deaths, we come to meet Someone who went through death to life. We can say: by virtue of Jesus’ death and resurrection, God has taken death into himself. It has been transformed into something that is not merely non-being but a stage or moment or passage that, since it is part of Jesus’ life, is also to be a part of our life.
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This has practical implications. We should not fear death, and neither should we precipitate it by euthanasia or suicide. Death remains hard for us—as of course it was hard for Jesus—but it is also the exciting threshold of meeting, face to face, the One who went through death to resurrection life. Death is something like a door to a world in which things move in the right direction: to life.
In our prayers, especially during Holy Week, we can “walk” with Jesus as he faces his own death, with its heavy psychological agony as well as the physical torture. In the end, he accepts what comes with confident hope, that what he is going through, alone and abandoned, no one else will ever have to go through alone and abandoned. This is our hope: that when death comes to us, we can take Jesus’ hand and be led by him from death to life.
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Out & About: On Palm Sunday, April 13, I am to preach at St. Augustine’s Oak Cliff, Dallas, at the 10:15 a.m. service. On Good Friday, April 18, I am to preach at Good Shepherd Cedar Hill, Dallas, at the 6 p.m. service.
The Good Books & Good Talk seminar next meets on Sunday, April 27, at 5 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, to discuss The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh. This short novel from the great English satirist is set in mid-20th-century California and centers on a cat cemetery. What’s not to like?