October 10th, 2024
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.
Our society today will talk about nearly anything in the most graphic detail, but the last real taboo remains death. We struggle even to say the word, replacing it with passed or passed away. But the old saying that nothing is more certain than death and taxes holds true. Even in a secular culture like ours there is a lot of superstition and wishful thinking about death. People become angels, or send messages in shooting stars. Part of that is our brain seeking to meter out the pain of bereavement. We can take only so much sorrow and forms of denial can be therapeutic in the short term. People find it understandably hard to take the view that there is no God and we are the random collection of atoms to its logical conclusion.
Christian funerals continue to speak hope into this unavoidable human reality. However, our hope is much more that wishful thinking in the face of pain. Our is based on the next stanza of the creed. In the Book of Common Prayer is stark: “He descended into hell.” The modern translation is slightly more faithful to the biblical basis of the creed when it says, “he descended to the dead”.
Karl Barth, reflecting on this part of the creed, says, “It stands there so unobtrusively and simply superfluously. But it is not there for nothing. Some day we shall be buried. Someday a company of men will process out to a churchyard and lower a coffin and everyone will go home; but one will not come back, and that will be me”.
Gregory of Nazianzus, the great 4th century Cappadocian theologian, said of Jesus “That which he did not assume, he could not heal.” Jesus did not conduct his mission in a hazchem suit. He completely identified with our humanity in order to heal all of our humanity. Humans go to their graves as finite creatures and guilty sinners. Jesus went there too. There were a lot of rumours spread by the Jewish authorities that Jesus either survived the crucifixion or had his body stolen. It was unusual for victims to be buried. The bodies were usually allowed to rot in place as a final indignity and warning to other rebels. As the Westminster Catechism says, “Christ’s humiliation after his death consisted in his being buried, and continuing in the state of the dead, and under the power of death till the third day”.
The good news of the Gospel transformed the attitude of Christians to death. As Ben Myers recounts, “Believers would assemble for prayer in tombs. They would worship Christ among the bones of the dead. Believers would raise the bodies of martyrs in the air and parade them through the streets like trophies. At funerals, they would gaze lovingly on the dead and sing psalms of praise over their bodies. Such behaviour shocked their pagan neighbours. According to Roman law, the dead had to be buried miles away from the city so that the living would not be contaminated. But Christians placed the dead right at the centre of their public gatherings.
A few years ago, I had a back operation involving a general anaesthetic. As I lay on the table, I was slightly worried when one of the nurses looked down and said, “Oh, you married me!” At that point, I hoped I’d done a good job. The anaesthetist got me to count down from 10. I remember getting to 5, and the next thing I recall was waking up in a hospital bed 4 hours later. When Jesus says to the repentant thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise”, I think this is the sort of experience he has in mind. Both the Jewish and Christian faiths are extravagantly physical. Jesus rose bodily from the dead. We do not pre-exist but come to being at conception. We die physically, and our bodies may completely disappear, but we are held safe in God’s love, awaiting the resurrection on the last day. The idea that there is an inner ‘us’ within a body is hard to justify from this understanding. We are inseparable from our bodies in that sense.
This creedal statement reassures us that Jesus Christ has so fully identified with the human condition that he is with us in life and in death. Not only does the resurrection assure us that there is life beyond death, but that even death itself cannot separate us from him.
As the psalmist says in Psalm 139 verse 7, “Where can I go from your Spirit? OR where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths (which in Hebrew is the word Sheol or the place of the dead), you are there also.”
John Preston, the Puritan divine, knew this. When he lay dying, they asked him if he feared death, now it was so close. “No,” whispered Preston; “I shall change my place, but I shall not change my company.” As if to say: I shall leave my friends, but not my Friend, for he will never leave me. He will never leave us or forsake us, either.
+Richard