Tag Archives: death

by

Life and Death

Click here to listen to the audio recording of this 17-minute message. Or watch a video of the message on Facebook here (the message starts at about 27 minutes).

The collect for today opens with the words, “Holy and righteous God, you set before us life and death”. This prayer sets the tone for today’s collection of readings, which are, literally, a matter of life and death. We are presented in the scriptures with two options – life and death – and invited to choose one. Let’s run through them swiftly together.

1 Corinthians 5:12-20. In this passage, Paul defends the importance of believing in the resurrection of the dead in general, and the resurrection of Christ in particular. If there is no resurrection, Paul argues, then there is no hope for us of a life after death. And if that is the case, our believing in Christ is to be pitied. Paul is impassioned in making his argument. You can hear, as you read, that this is for him, a make or break in the Christian faith – it is a matter of eternal life or eternal death.

Luke 6:17-26. Here, Jesus presents a series of blessings and woes, each comprising three verses. The blessings remind us of his beatitudes in Matthew 5, and speak of God’s favour on those who are vulnerable and marginalised, and those who suffer for the sake of Christ – they will be raised up. The woes are dire warnings against those who laud their wealth and power over others, who bask if their own accomplishments and who are self-sufficient – they will be brought low. Jesus is not afraid to divide the world into good and bad, blessed and cursed – it is a matter of life and death.

Jeremiah 17:5-10. Jeremiah echoes Jesus’ curses and woes. “Cursed is the one” he says, who trusts in human things and who turns away from God. That person will be like a dry shrub in a salty uninhabited wasteland. Jeremiah’s words here are clear and uncompromising. By contrast, “blessed is the one” who trust in God, for they will be like a tree, with its roots in a river, who is able to withstand challenges and be green and fruitful – it is a matter of life and death.

Psalm 1. The Psalmist replicates Jeremiah’s imagery of a “blessed one” who does not keep company with the wicked, but rather who spends time with God. This one is like a tree planted by a river. The ready water strengths and protects the tree, so that it is always fruitful. By contrast, the wicked are like chaff, who have no roots and blown away by the wind. Their way leads to destruction – it is a matter of life and death.

These four readings all say the same thing – there is a path of life and a path of death. The path of life involves maintaining fellowship with God and God’s people, and living in accordance with God’s values. The path of death involves relying on oneself, disregarding God and placing too much hope in how others perceive one. The consequences of these two paths are a matter of life and death.

All too often, we stray onto the path of death. Sometimes we do so quite consciously and deliberately – we turn from God and we choose to think or act in ways that we know are ungodly. Other times, we just stray there, quite unintentionally, as if drawn there. Roman Catholic theologians call this ‘original sin’ and Calvinists call it ‘total depravity’ or sometimes ‘pervasive depravity’. It relates to the fall of humanity in Genesis 3 – that our hearts, created by God for good, incline towards evil. If we are not watchful and careful, we all too easily drift onto the path of death, by turning from God towards sin.

We must be far more alert, awake and vigilant regarding our heart and our actions. We must be far more deliberate and intentional in what we choose. If we drift through life without thinking, we are at great risk of drifting onto the path of death. Rather, we need to be conscious and thoughtful about life. We must choose, repeatedly, even continuously, to follow the path of life, the path of blessing, the path of Christ.

Moses speaks strongly to his people about this shortly before they exit the wilderness. It is worth reading in full: Deuteronomy 30:15-20a:

See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life.

Now choose life!

Featured image from: https://blogs.gartner.com/hank-barnes/files/2013/04/fork-in-the-road.jpg
by

Live light

Click here to listen to the audio of this 13-minute message. Or watch the YouTube video below, or read the text summary after that.

Matthew 16:21-28 is sandwiched between two remarkable narratives of Jesus’ revelation. Just before (Matthew 16:13-20), Peter recognises Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God, and is praised by Jesus for his insight and promised a great future in the Kingdom of God. Just after (Matthew 17:1-13), Peter sees the transfiguration, where Jesus shucks off his human form and reveals himself as God the Son. In between these two remarkable stories, Jesus rebukes Peter strongly, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns” (v23). It is quite a fascinating narrative sequence!

We learn something about Jesus’ view of life and death from this passage. Just before Jesus rebuke of Peter, he was explaining that he would soon die and then be raised to life again (v21). Peter could not accept such crazy talk about death, particularly after everything that had just happened. After the rebuke, Jesus continues by explaining that if we cling to the life we have in this world, we risk losing our life in the world to come: “What good will it be,” he asks, “for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (v26).

While Jesus clearly makes the most of this life and enjoys it – we see him living life to the full and remember how much he achieved in just 33 or so years of life and probably just three year of ministry – he reminds us that this is not all there is. There is a far greater, longer and more fulfilling life awaiting those who belief – life eternal.

We are encouraged not to cling too tightly to this life, but to hold this life lightly, much as we might hold a baby bird who has fallen out of its nest. Don’t squeeze it!

Our faith tells us about an eternal life that we will enjoy with God and those who died in faith. But too often Christians live as if they have no faith – we are afraid of dying and we cling to this life as if it is all there is.

Let us rather enjoy this life – live it to the full – while also not being afraid of death and looking forward to the eternal life that is still to come.

Featured image from https://za.pinterest.com/pin/79305643409374403/

by

At the Foot of the Cross

Click here to listen to the audio recording of this 10-minute message. Or watch the YouTube video below, or read the text that follows.

It is sometimes easy (and more comfortable) to gloss over the death of Jesus on Good Friday. I grew up in a church that didn’t have a Good Friday service, and so for years I’d hop from the happiness of Palm Sunday to joy of Easter Sunday. For sure, on Easter Day, we’d get a gruesome account of Jesus death, but the sermon would end with “but he has risen from the dead, hallelujah”.

I believe that it is important and good for our faith to position ourselves with the disciples and particularly with Jesus’ mother Mary, who did not (like us) know the happy ending to the story. As they stood at the foot of the cross watching Jesus’ life ebb away on that Friday afternoon, they could not foresee his resurrection. Imagine the pain and horror they experienced, the utter loss of hope, the grief at seeing someone so beautiful and innocent dying in such a dreadful and slow way. Their hope for a better society was shattered and their own sense of having a part to play in the transformation of the world was in pieces.

And this experience persisted through Friday and Saturday until Easter Sunday.

During this time of crisis, they did what needed to be done. Joseph of Arimathea negotiated with the authorities to claim Jesus body, placed him in a tomb he owned and wrapped Jesus temporarily in a burial shroud. He sealed the tomb to protect Jesus body. The disciples and Jesus’ family went home to observe the sabbath and remained at home until dawn on Sunday, when they went back to prepare his body properly for burial. In their shock and dismay, they continued to do what needed to be done.

I encourage you to stay with it. To stay in the midst of the distress and the heaviness of Jesus death over the coming days.

2020.04.10_Good_Friday

Featured image “Calvary” by Edward Munch (1900), from https://arthive.com/edvardmunch/works/269172~Calvary

by

On death

Click here to listen to this 17-minute message.

(This sermon was preached on 25 August. I was away at the time, so unable to load it until now.)

The week leading up to this sermon was quite a challenge. A dear colleague of ours, Prof Tessa Hochfeld, was killed in a freak biking accident the previous weekend. During the week leading up to this sermon, I attended her funeral and lead a memorial service for her at our university. Tessa was one of those rare human beings – brilliant, compassionate, humble and rooted in social justice. Her death shook us all and was uppermost in mind during the week. So, it was inevitable that the question of death should become the topic of this sermon.

As it turned out, in the week after the sermon, another colleague of ours, Dr Memory Mathe, was brutally murdered, along with her domestic helper, Ms Pretty Moyo, by men who wanted her car. We buried Memory yesterday.

In addition, a spate of femicides in South Africa have led to a rising tide of anger, particularly among women, leading to demonstrations around the country. Uyinene Mrwetyana, a university student, was lured into a post office where she was raped and murdered. She also was buried yesterday. Death in all its forms has been prominent in our thoughts.

Death is not a comfortable topic for most people. We tend to shy away from it. We regard talking or thinking about death as morbid. We often shield children entirely from death. When an older person talks about dying, we often tell them to ‘buck up’. And when they are on their deathbed, we sometimes do more than we should to prolong their life, no matter how poor its quality, no matter their own wishes. Most of us appear to suffer from thanatophobia – the fear of death.

Christians are by no means exempted from this fear!

I have long thought that if Christians cannot talk openly about death, who can? We, of all people, should be able to look death in the eye and, while not welcoming it, not be afraid it.

In this message, I grapple with Biblical views on death. In simplistic terms, the scriptures present two views of death: death as bad and death as good. I walk us through these views and suggest a way forward for us as Christians to engage with death holistically.

I dedicate the message to Tessa Hochfeld and to Memory Mathe, Pretty Moyo, Uyinene Mrwetyana and other women who have died at the hands of men.

2019.08.25_Yellow_Jesus

Feature image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jesus_in_Clouds_by_Sunset_2.jpg

by

Dying to live

Click here to listen to this 10-minute message.

I am still reeling at the destruction of Notre Dame through the fire yesterday. That cathedral was a symbol of God’s presence in France, and its burning reverberates powerfully with me. The burned church evokes images of Christ’s death on the cross. Like the cathedral, Christ is damaged and destroyed. Its devastation leaves an empty shell. We are shocked, dismayed. How is this possible?

But in John 12:20-36, Jesus talks about his own death, not as something to be avoided, and not even as something inevitable, but as something necessary, intended, perhaps even desirable. He uses the analogy of a seed, that must die in order to produce more seeds.

And he also says that we who follow him, must similarly die; that if we love this life on earth too much, we’re in trouble; that we need to hold on to it just lightly. Instead, if we follow him, through death, we will be with him in glory.

He raises the question of what we have to die to today. Of what in our lives needs to burn to the ground, so that something new can spring forth.

2019.04.16_Notre_Dame

Feature image: Interior of Notre Dame following the fire on 15 April 2019, CNN.

by

Being God’s Beloved: Day 34: The Death of God

“And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit” (Matthew 27:50).

“With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last” (Mark 15:27).

“Jesus called out with a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’ When he had said this, he breathed his last” (Luke 23:46).

“When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit” (John 19:30).

Jesus died on that cross.

God died on that cross.

This is a hard concept for many of us. We may prefer to think that just the human part of Jesus died on the cross. But, as I have noted before, Jesus Christ was a perfectly integrated person comprising both human and divine natures, blended together, distinct but inseparable. When Jesus suffered and died, God also suffered and died. That is the inevitable and right conclusion to draw in light of the incarnation.

Let me try to put this more precisely. When Jesus suffered and died, God the Son – the Second Person of the Trinity – also suffered and died. ‘God’ is shorthand for the triune God – Father, Son and Spirit. Of course, God the Father was not incarnate in Jesus; nor God the Spirit – only God the Son.

Let us step back a bit and reflect on this notion, which many Christians find hard to digest. Indeed, it is one of the great mysteries of our faith.

In the incarnation, which we reflected on back on Day 19, we saw how the eternal Son of God had to empty himself – we used the Greek word kenosis – in order to become human. It was a diminishing of God. Philippians 2 tells that for this to happen, the Son had to not consider equality with God something to be grasped. This suggests that the Son had to separate himself out from the perfectly intimate fellowship that had been enjoyed by the Godhead since before the beginning of time. God – Father, Son and Spirit – had spent eternity in the most wonderful and intimately connected relationship. At the incarnation, God the Son separates out from that fellowship in order to become small in order to become human.

This was a tremendous sacrifice for God to make – the Son experiences smallness and aloneness for the first time in his existence. And the Father and Spirit experience a gap between themselves, without the Son. What an amazing gift the incarnation is – God’s offering of Godself to be immersed in human form among us!

This separation of God from God – of Son from Father and Spirit – explains why Jesus spent so much time in prayer. He was working to maintain his fellowship with Father and Spirit, a fellowship that he had always taken for granted, but was now pulled apart by the incarnation.

Thirty something years later, as Jesus hangs on the cross, he draws closer and closer to a much greater separation, a much more fundamental pulling apart. He anticipates death. And he suffers with it.

When we think of Jesus’ suffering – and we have heard this often in sermons – we often emphasise Jesus’ physical suffering. To be sure, death by crucifixion is a grotesque way to die – too awful for me to even begin to write about. But in truth, many many people were crucified and Jesus’ crucifixion was no worse than anyone else’s. In fact, mercifully, he died quickly, while others lasted a day or two – a prolonged and agonising death. The physical suffering was bad, but this is not what crushed his heart.

An important aspect of Jesus’ suffering was the Cup of Suffering that he drank, on which we reflected on Day 31. While in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus anticipated this Cup, grappled with what he understood was coming, and eventually agreed to drink it. But on the cross, he did the drinking. He took into himself the sins of the whole world. The hatred and arrogance and carelessness that prompted his execution were devastating. This man of peace and love treated with such contempt and violence. I imagine my own sin – spread over the past 46 years – and Jesus drinking that. Ghastly! And then I imagine the sin of my family and friends, and then the whole world, and then the whole human race throughout history, together with this history of the world to come. I cannot conceive how deep that Cup must have been, how long it took to drink, how bitter its contents. Jesus the human and Christ the Son of God suffered.

But as his death was immanent, Christ Jesus experienced a new and most painful suffering – he realised that he would be entirely cut off from the Godhead. God the Son would die and be separated from God. The separation of the incarnation was a tremendous sacrifice, but nevertheless the Son still had a relationship with the Father and Spirit. But in death, this would terminate, and he would be cut off.

And so, “at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’– which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Mark 15:34, also Matthew 27:46). As his death approaches, Christ Jesus experiences separation from God – he experiences being completely alone. One theologian refers to this as Jesus’ experience of “Godforsakenness”.[1] Let us not take the easy route of thinking of this as the human Jesus experiencing the loss of the Son of God – as if the Son quickly abandoned the man just before he died. No! Let us affirm that when Jesus died, it was the whole divine-human person who died. And thus it was the whole divine-human person who experienced being forsaken by God.

It is so shocking. Almost overwhelming our mind as we try to contemplate the horror.

Can you try to imagine the devastation experienced by God the Father and God the Spirit, as they lose a third of the Godhead? The terrible rupture in God’s being? The huge hole as a third of God is ripped away? The terrible loneliness of death?

As much as Christ felt Godforsaken, so too the Father and Son, because they too had lost contact with the Second Person of the Trinity, with God. No wonder there was darkness and earthquakes – the whole cosmos reeled with the enormity of the death of God.

Perhaps you need to just pause here for a few minutes, and close your eyes, and consider what you’ve read.

 

 

We need to accept our part in perpetrating this terrible deed. We may feel that because it occurred before our time, we personally did not do this. But in the cross, all time – past, present and future – come together, and so we were as much a part of it as those who cried out “Crucify him!”. The Cup of Suffering contained our sin also. And it was his drinking of that Cup that resulted in Jesus’ death. It was the collective sin of the entire human race that did this. And you and I are members of that race. We did this to God.

This is the part of Easter that should cause our hearts to be wrenched asunder. That I should have done this to God.

In my church, on Maundy Thursday evening, the day before Good Friday, we strip the sanctuary. In other words, we carry everything out from the front of the church – all chairs, tables, books, decorations, flowers, linen, everything. All that is left is the altar – stripped naked. And the lights are dimmed. And we leave in silence. It always devastates me.

Then on Good Friday afternoon, we have a three-hour service, where we keep vigil at the cross during Jesus last hours, until he dies, and then we leave in silence. This long, quiet, contemplative service is often excruciating. I want to run away from the terribleness of it – I can barely bear to stay at the cross.

By the time I get home on Good Friday, I am a spiritual and emotional wreck. I stay at home quietly until Easter Sunday. I cannot go out, cannot go shopping, cannot get together with family. I am immobilised. It feels like a lead weight is resting on my heart. I can’t breathe.

This is the death of God.

It is time to be silent.

Meditation for the Day

Make some time to be silent. To just sit with this. To not rush off to something happier. To not sugar coat it.

Prayer for the Day

Lord, forgive me.

Being_Gods_Beloved_square_3

[1] Moltmann, J. (1993). The crucified God. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, p. 227.