John 12, 27-28: ‘Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—“Father, save me from this hour?” No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.’
During Lent this year, we have been thinking about various kinds of limitation. Today, at the beginning of Passiontide, we are asked to think about the ultimate limit, the limit of limits which is death. Recall how Lent began: on Ash Wednesday when the priest touched our foreheads with ash, we were told to remember that we were dust, and that to dust we should return. We began from that reminder of mortality; and during the weeks of Lent, we have followed Christ as he approaches his death. Lent leads toward the Passion and the crucifixion; in this season, mortality is never far away. The discipline of fasting (in so far as it is still observed) is a reminder of the transience and fragility of the body; a warning not to put all our eggs in that rather vulnerable basket.
Even outside of Lent, it is part of Christian discipline that we should live our lives toward the fact of death, live in the knowledge that we are, as far as this world is concerned, finite beings, moving between a beginning and an end. In former times Christians used to remind themselves of that through physical symbols; monks would have skulls in their cells. People would pray for a good death; as the Orthodox liturgy puts it, ‘that the end of our lives may be Christian, without torment, blameless and peaceful, and that we may have a good defence before the fearful Judgement seat of Christ.’ What that might mean was suggested a year ago today, by the death of John Paul II.
Christian living involves the acknowledgment of limit, because God had made us as material beings, within time and space. But we live in an age when people reject limits. The limited life is, almost by definition, a deficient life; freedom, the throwing-down of boundaries, is the ideal. Perhaps that is why we feel such reluctance to give up low-cost air-travel in the interests of the environment: quick and cheap movement beyond our everyday boundaries has come to seem a natural right.
But to identify the good life with the absence of limits damages us in a number of ways. It creates problems in our dealings with people whose lives are necessarily limited—the disabled, the old. We have to work very hard—as a report this week revealed—not to see those limited by age as less than fully human. And it makes it particularly difficult for us to cope with death. How can a life defined in terms of movement forward, the breaching of boundaries, the exploration of possibility, cope with that final limit by which all the possibilities that enrich our lives are brought to an end?
These are perhaps the particular problems of our culture. But facing death has always been hard, whatever the cultural circumstances, and this was as true in the time of Jesus as it is now. We tend to imagine that people in earlier times, in the ages of faith, could make a confident assumption of an afterlife in a way that we no longer can. But it is worth remembering that in the time of Christ the reality of a life after death was a matter for debate, as it is now. The aristocracy of the Jewish religious hierarchy, the Sadducees, rejected the idea; they went along with the writer of Psalm 30, who asks (rhetorically) “Will the dust praise you? Will it proclaim your faithfulness?” (v. 9). The implied answer is ‘no’; the dead praise no one, because they are dead. Jesus himself was offered a trick question on this point: if there is a life after death, who will the often-married be married to? This was meant less as a question than as a reductio ad absurdum of the whole idea, a bit like asking whether, when we see granny in heaven, she will still have her hearing aid.
Seeing death as other than the last limit has never been easy, because all the immediate evidence suggests that that is what it is. Nor was it easy for Jesus. In the earlier gospels, Mark and Matthew, we have the story of the agony in
We might well ask what is going on. If the world has had a problem with Christ’s divinity, the Church has often had a problem with his humanity. Does the movement of the gospels—from human trepidation to divine certainty—reflect a tendency to tidy the humanity away in favour of the divinity? Are we watching the early Church deal with details that it has come to find embarrassing?
That is one conclusion that we might draw; but not, I think, the only one. The doubleness in the record—human fear against divine assurance—takes us very close to the heart of Christ’s experience, and has much to say for our own approach to death. The gospels suggest that two things were going on at the same time. On the one hand, Jesus, because he was fully human, approached death as we do: in fear and uncertainty. He would much rather it didn’t happen; or at least, not yet. As John puts it, ‘Now my soul is troubled.’ As Matthew puts it, more dramatically, ‘Let this cup pass from me…’ We should resist the idea, which is already being floated in John’s gospel, that Jesus knew the whole script from the beginning; that he hung on the cross knowing that in thirty-six hours or so he would be out of all this. To imagine that he knew how the story would play itself out is to compromise his humanity, to separate him from the rest of us who do not know these things.
Yet something else was going on. John puts it in this way: ‘What should I say—“Father, save me from this hour”? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.’ Despite the fear of death he was conscious of two things. One was that there was purpose in all this: ‘it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.’ There was a design that extended even to the point of death. Second, he was confident that God would not allow death to destroy what he was and what he had done: ‘Father, glorify your name.’ Do not let my life go down in defeat and oblivion. Make what I have shown of you, your glory, visible even in death.
Both aspects—the fear, the confidence that God will not give death the victory—are there, too, in the other gospels. Alongside the agony in the garden, Mark shows us Jesus telling his disciples that ‘he must be killed, and after three days rise again’ (Mark 8, 31). We may reasonably suspect that hindsight has some part in those words. Nevertheless it is clear that Jesus conveyed to his disciples his confidence, that God would not permit death to bring his life to nothing.
But did he know how God would bring that about? I think not. He had to trust God for the good outcome; this was not some performance that he was acting out in full knowledge of the last scene. Christ had to live and die by faith, no less than we do; in that, too, his humanity was complete. And in that he does, really and forcefully, come very close to us in his Passion. We, too, cannot reconcile our feelings about death. We fear and we hope. We know only too well, as he did, what death looks like. We, too, have not read the script to the end. But just as Jesus trusted that his Father would bring about some impossible but saving outcome, even when the darkness of death and desolation was overwhelming, so we too can trust that God will surprise us in this as in so much else. What the Resurrection tells us, practically and definitively, is that our trust will not be disappointed. Out of the ultimate limit of death God will bring the ultimate freedom of Resurrection.
Sermon for the fifth Sunday in Lent, 2006.
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