On death and Christmas parties, or How to inhabit time

The office Christmas party - more likely in my experience to be the office meal out - is a standard fixture of December, and often the only occasion when colleagues will socialise together.  I've been out of the office environment for a number of years, and this is one of the things I've really missed.  But this year I've noticed that it doesn't seem to be really happening.  I know people whose 'Christmas' meals have already happened; others who will delay having lunch together until January.  The festive period is just too busy already, perhaps with work or perhaps just with the preparation for Christmas proper.  So the office do gets moved, one direction or the other.

At one level this is just perfectly sensible pragmatism, and it really doesn't matter at all.  But on another level I wonder what it says about the way we view time.  I think we are used to being able to rearrange time around ourselves.  It doesn't suit me for it to be Christmas right now, so I'll move the date.   This picture - the individual sovereign over time - really doesn't sit well with the biblical picture of time at all.

Consider the structure of the biblical account of time.  The first creation account in Genesis 1:1-2:3 is built around the seven days of the week; it is a time focussed account of creation.  (The second, in the rest of chapter 2, is space focussed.  One of the reasons I think it is a mistake to try to harmonise them is the loss of these two crucial perspectives on created life).  Time is given, according to Genesis, by God as the gracious framework for human life.  That time is a gracious gift is underlined by the institution of the Sabbath, a day of holy rest, for worship and the enjoyment of God - not to be filled with the strivings or the pleasures of the individual, but to be entered into as a thing prepared by the Creator.  The Sabbath gift shapes and defines the rest of the week.

This pattern continues through the history of Israel.  The weekly Sabbath, along with the annual festivals, define time as something which relates the history of the nation with God, and therefore as a means of living into the relationship established in that history.  Israel is not to claim mastery over time, but to live in its God-given rhythms.  It is only as part of the covenant curse that the relationship with time becomes fraught and desperate.

This matters for two reasons.  Firstly, in a big picture theological sense, time is the created echo of God's own eternity - his gift to us to allow us, finite beings, to enjoy relationship and being-in-sequence, analagous to his own eternal Being and Trinitarian relationship.  So to inhabit time properly matters.  Time, with its proper structures, is to be received and entered into as a gift, not regarded as a resource to be infinitely manipulated for my convenience.  Time is about knowing God and relating to him.  The church, I think wisely, has followed the example set by the Lord for Israel and related time to salvation history through the calendar of fasts and feasts, and I see that as an important way to reflect this approach to time.  It isn't necessary to do it this way, but it is important to do it some way.

Second, one day you will die.  Time, you see, is not infinitely malleable.  There is a date and a time marked in the calendar - not in your calendar, not on your personal timetable - when the last bit of time (as far as you are concerned, at least) will befall you.  (The only way this will be avoided is if Christ returns first, in which case your last bit of time will be everyone's last bit of time; at least, time as we know it).  Pretended sovereignty over time in the day to day of our lives does not prepare us well for the fact that we will one day hit an appointment we can't shift.  It certainly doesn't prepare us to receive that appointment as coming from the hand of the gracious Lord of our time and all time.

So anyway.  Have your Christmas party as and when, I guess.  But don't kid yourself that you are master of your time.  It is a gift; enter into it with joy, and perhaps then you will leave it when you have to with contentment.

Some disconnected thoughts on All Saints Day

1. I'm guessing not many people in my ecclesiastical neck of the woods will be celebrating All Saints Day, and there are good reasons for that.  However, if we carefully observe that in biblical usage a 'saint' is not a believer of superior rank, but simply anyone who is sanctified (saint-ified) by union with the Lord Jesus through faith, that removes most of the theological objections.  All Saints Day is a day to remember the believers who have gone before us.

2. In our day, there has been a lot of helpful pushback against talk of 'heaven' as the Christian's ultimate destiny, with the more biblical emphasis on 'new creation' coming to the fore.  That is all to the good, but it would be a shame if in the recovery of the great Christian hope we lost something of the penultimate hope, which is to depart and be with Christ.  It is true that we will not all sleep, and we cannot say whether we are the generation that will not die but will see Christ's return - but many of our brothers and sisters have slept, have gone to be with the Lord, and it's right that we bear in mind that they are safe in heaven.

3. It is a huge encouragement to know that there are those who now enjoy something of what we will one day rejoice in forever.  It seems to me that the New Testament does not say that departed believers currently enjoy the vision of God which will captivate them for all eternity; there is a sense in which they cannot yet see the Lord as he is, because they are not wholly themselves - they await the resurrection at the Lord's appearing.  They currently rest in peace; they will rise in glory.  Like us, they do not yet know what they shall be.  But what a blessing to be in the presence of the Lord, even if it means being away from the body!  Better to be a doorkeeper in the house of our God...

4. There is real and living fellowship between those who have gone before and those of us who still labour on earth.  I don't think we have immediate access to the departed saints - I don't think we can or should pray to them, for example - but we have something in a sense more intimate than immediacy.  We are joined to Christ, and they are joined to Christ.  We are one body with them, united by the one Spirit.  They pray and praise above, we pray and praise below, and it is all taken up in one great worship service, presented before God as the offering of the whole church in Jesus.  When we gather we worship, we gather into their presence, because we gather to Christ and to the heavenly Zion.

5. All of this answers, with a firm and unsentimental reality, the dim groping after hope that we see in so much funeral mawkishness.  They are not dead, but have simply gone nextdoor - that sort of thing.  For the dead in Christ, how gloriously true it is that they are not really dead!  How we can rejoice in their comfort and joy!  In Christ they all live.  Alleluia.

Advent II: Might not die

The syllogism: All men must die, Caius is a man, therefore Caius must die, is no doubt an illuminating statement of pagan wisdom.  But it is not a statement of Christian wisdom...  It cannot be, because it overlooks the parousia of Jesus Christ...  (IV/3.2, 924).

People often think that the most characteristic claim of Christianity is that there is life after death.  The Christian gospel, based on the resurrection of Christ, does indeed make that claim.  But if it has become characteristic, that is because we Christians have lost sight of the bigger, and more outrageous, claim that the gospel makes about the end of human life.

We believe that we might not die.

Indeed, every Christian must believe, on the grounds that the resurrected Christ has promised to return, and that this return will be the final, consummating event of human history as we know it, that there is a possibility that nobody else will die.

From the perspective of the NT, the whole of history is now hastening towards the final revelation of the glory of Jesus Christ in his coming.  In that perspective, there is a sense in which the 'normal' way for an individual human history to come an end now - in conformity with the end which we expect for general human history - is with the return of the Lord.  Death is a hanger-on, a left-over from an earlier age, an age which still looked forward to the cross and did not yet look out with triumph from the empty tomb.

You might not die.

Waking up

David is quite excited about waking up:

I lay down and slept;
I woke again, for the Lord sustained me.

On a couple of occasions he welcomes in the dawn with praise.  What is so exciting about a new day?  I don't think David even had access to coffee.  What did the morning have to offer him?

I suppose the key thing is that David has been asleep.  Being asleep is the state of least control.  Awake, David may be King and have followers at his beck and call.  Asleep, he is absolutely vulnerable.  Sleep is like a temporary death.  So waking up is like... a resurrection?

The morning brings fresh mercies.  The death of sleep has wiped out the sin of yesterday - but to rise from that sleep takes a new act of mercy.  Putting yesterday to death doesn't necessarily lead to tomorrow.  Fresh mercy, new life.

But fresh mercies are crowded out pretty quickly by fresh struggles, fresh disappointments, fresh sins, fresh troubles.  Fresh, but old.  They seem new, but they belong to yesterday's yesterdays.  Not yet new, not totally.  Morning becomes afternoon, and we long for sleep - to put the day with all its mess to bed.  To die, to sleep.

And yet every moment could be a morning, rich with new mercy, springing unexpected from the grave of just now, the grave dug by Christ with his own cruciform shovel.

That is why it says:

“Awake, O sleeper,
and arise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.”

Life and death

"Choosing the time you die is a human right."

That is according to the partner of a healthy 75 year old who recently decided to end her own life rather than face the "indignity" of ageing.  The story is, from my perspective, desperately sad - but it makes complete sense.  If life is my possession, then I can give it up when I choose.  If I have a right to life based on nothing more than my own individuality, then I surely have a right to die.

This morning, as most mornings, I said Morning Prayer, and as usual prayed: "as we rejoice in the gift of this new day..."  Today is a gift.  My life today is a gift.  But that can only be true and meaningful if there is a Giver, and if he is good.  Even a good day is only a gift if it is generously given by Someone.  And a bad day - the sorts of days which presumably Gill Pharaoh was imagining when she chose to die rather than to live through them - could only be a gift if it came from a Giver who was able to take our suffering and do something positive with it.  And of course one day we will die, and that day of my death could only be a gift - a day I could rejoice in receiving - if it came from the hand of a Giver who was able to redeem even death.

In other words, if and only if the gospel is true - if Jesus died and rose - then life is a gift, every day is a gift, and nobody has a right to choose to die (though they certainly do, following Jesus, have the 'right' to give up life for another or for Christ - but that is a different thing).

It strikes me also that the gospel has something to say about the supposed indignity of old age.  Wherein is the indignity felt to lie?  Ms Pharaoh said "I simply do not want to follow this natural deterioration through to the last stage when I may be requiring a lot of help."  Is there any inherent indignity in requiring a lot of help?  I think I know what she meant; it is not a nice thought that one day I might be reliant on others for basic functions like toileting and eating.  But the gospel does tell me that my dignity as a human being, far from being contradicted by my need for 'a lot of help', derives from being helped.  I am a person Jesus died to help.  I am utterly, utterly dependent on him for everything - and existing in that relationship of dependence is what being really human means.

All in all, I am struck by the contrast between a culture where life is a random eruption from a sphere of death, and can collapse into that sphere again at a whim, and the gospel, where life is a gift to be treasured because it can be fulfilled in Christ.  And I am reminded that my only comfort, in life and death, is that I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.

Dead in his death

I think we don't talk about the death of Jesus enough, or at the very least we don't talk about it in certain ways.  We talk about Jesus dying in our place, we talk about Jesus bearing God's wrath - okay, we could and probably should talk about these things more, but they are there.  What we don't talk about nearly enough is the fact that when Jesus died, we also died.

The New Testament is really, really clear on this.  Because one has died for all, all have died.  Objectively, it is true that the end of sinful humanity under God's judgement has taken place in Christ's death.  Subjectively, it comes to be true that the end of my personal sinful humanity has taken place in him at baptism.  Or didn't you know that when you were baptized it was into his death?

It is not only that Jesus died so that I wouldn't have to; it is also Jesus died and I died with him.

This is one half of the basis for the NT appeal to live a holy life as a new creation.  How can you do otherwise?  The old self is dead; the old way of doing things is dead.  (The other half is resurrection, and the vivifying power of the Spirit to enable a new way of doing things).

One important implication is that my sin is always in the past.  Sin is never the future.  Even the sin which I will commit tomorrow is decisively in the past, because it belongs to the old self which is dead.  It cannot therefore define me.

This is no fiction.  Sanctification is not by imagining that the sinful self were dead and seeking to live out our imagination.  It is real, real in Christ Jesus.  Faith means letting that reality as it is in Christ be my subjective reality today by the Spirit.

Really dead

The day Christ spent in the tomb is all about this: he was really dead.  It wasn't a trick.  The Romans didn't half-execute anyone.  He was dead.  He had utterly succumbed to the brutality and horror of life in a sinful world.  More: he had experienced in full the curse of God which lies on a rebellious race.  He was dead.

He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried.  He descended into hell...

Today is the proof that he tasted death.  And here's the thing with death: you don't get the full flavour unless you drain the cup, right down to the bottom.  There is the bitterness, in the last swallow.  There is the vile taste that catches in the throat.  He tasted death.

For everyone.  He drank it down for everyone,

And he will swallow up on this mountain
the covering that is cast over all peoples,
the veil that is spread over all nations.

Isaiah 25:7

The last victorious act

Reading John Owen's meditations On the Glory of Christ is one of the greatest pleasures that I have enjoyed so far in life - no exaggeration.  As I've been revisiting it recently, one of the things that has struck me is that the preface is largely about death.  The author was himself not long for this world: "My principal work having been now for a long season to die daily, as living in a continual expectation of my dissolution..."

What will enable us to face death?  How can we die well?  How "may we be able to encounter death cheerfully, constantly, and victoriously"?

Owen proposes three things.  Firstly, we must be prepared to surrender our spirits to God, after the example of Christ - something which is very difficult for us, both on account of our sinfulness and on account of the natural constitution of a human being as body and soul conjoined.  Secondly, we must be prepared to let go of the flesh and everything that goes with it, good and bad.  Thirdly, we must be happy to resign ourselves to God's management of time, and not to resent his timing.  How are these things, which are admittedly desperately difficult, to be achieved?

For Owen, these "cannot be attained unto, without a prospect of that glory that shall give us a new state far more excellent than what we here leave or depart from.  This we cannot have, whatever we pretend, unless we have some present views of the glory of Christ."  We cannot expect to enjoy Christ hereafter unless we have enjoyed him in this life.  And we cannot have any expectation of dying well unless we have that future glory to look forward to.

Since unless the Lord comes (Maranatha!) I will certainly die, there is nothing better for me to do with my time now than to meditate on the glory of Christ, to acquire a taste for his goodness, to learn to value him above everything else.  In so far as I do this, I will be prepared to surrender to death.

"This is the last victorious act of faith, wherein its conquest over its last enemy death itself doth consist" - namely, to be so delighted by the prospect of seeing Christ in his glory that I can be comforted in death and happily surrender my spirit into his hands.

God help us so to do.

Death, thou shalt die

The combination of two readings at Evening Prayer on Wednesday has been running around my brain the last couple of days.  In 1 Kings 17, the prophet Elijah raises from death the son of a widow who has been sheltering him during the divinely-imposed famine in Israel; in Acts 20, the apostle Paul brings back from death a young man who has fallen from a window after falling asleep during a lengthy apostolic homily.

Back from death.

I don't want to be morbid about it, but there's really no getting around the fact that death is the only absolutely terrible thing, the only thing that is, in an absolutely unqualified sense, disaster.  Anything else, even the worst thing, leaves us with some hope, or perhaps the possibility of learning, or perhaps the door to repentance.  Death ends it all.  Let's not kid ourselves or give false comfort by saying that death is not the end.  It is the end.  The annihilation of everything I have been, could have been, wanted to be.  And it is an intruder.  I was not made for this.  In so far as life is God's gift, it is grace, benefit, goodness - yes, even in all its struggles and hardships.  Death is the taking away of that gift.  Nowhere else do we see so clearly, if we have the eyes for it, that we stand under God's judgement.

All our days pass away under your wrath.

To be called back from death is nothing less than new creation.  Undoing the destruction, preserving the personality, remaking the life that has passed into shadow.

How can it be?

Jesus died, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

Do you believe this, O my fearful soul?

House of Mourning

Last night, I think we walked home past a house where someone had died.  I don't know that for sure, but the circumstantial evidence was strong: police car, ambulance, paramedics bike.  The biggest indicator, a wail of grief.  Inbetween sobs, somebody was crying out 'please, please!'  I don't know with whom they were pleading: the paramedic, the departed, the universe, God?  It was indescribably painful to hear, and although we only heard it in passing it left me really quite shaken.

Made me think about death.

I think everyone is either terrified by death, or doesn't understand death.  To have such a final limit - and a limit which nobody knows when they will cross - is surely the most horrific thing.  No matter how much people try to persuade themselves that death is just a part of natural existence, I cannot believe anyone is really as resigned to death as that position would lead us to expect.  To pass from life - which means to pass from everything, including yourself - is the most appalling prospect.  I will be honest: I dread it.  In fact, I think dread could be defined as the subjective reaction to the objective prospect of death.

In the face of that, Christianity is about dying well.  Oh, I know, it's about living well, enjoying the here and now, delighting in God's good creation, loving people around us, investing in the world.  Of course it is.  But all that stuff is just the stuff that is threatened by death.

If my faith in Christ doesn't help me to die, what use is it?  If I cannot die in peace, how can I live in peace?