Death and Life
Many have exercised their minds to get to the core of the tale told by the Apostle John about the cosy and friendly family of Martha, Mary and Lazarus who lived not far from Jerusalem in the village of Bethany. They were close and loving friends of Jesus, offering him hospitality when he was in Jerusalem for the Hebrew festivals. We are told that they knew that Jesus loved them, and we also read that they loved him too. It is a most satisfying and homely narrative in the tough life of the ministry of Jesus.
They welcomed him in, and gave him a place to be safe indoors when he had had a difficult time with the Jerusalem-based Judean leadership. We are even told how Jesus fell in with them: Mary - the quieter of the two sisters - had crept up on Jesus as he was teaching. She had a bottle of perfume, which she poured over his feet, wiping them with her own hair. Now, a woman’s hair was a precious and secret possession, perhaps only to be let loose for her husband. Yet, Mary had felt such agape love for this deeply charismatic young preacher that she was, in that moment, lost in the purest of loves that can be experienced outwith marriage.
That these three siblings lived together in harmony is remarkable, but perhaps not that unusual. Martha, the practical one. Lazarus, the quiet one. Mary, the bright-eyed one. But, disaster struck; Lazarus had fallen critically ill, and so Jesus was sent for. We are told that news came to Jesus, yet he completed the day’s work, spend two days further, then finally set off for the home of their friends.
At this point we must stop our reminiscences and analysis. For a fifth character steps onto the stage: Death. For now we could so easily go on to contemplate the theological importance of what Jesus would do, and forget that he let Lazarus die. The Lord of Life let his friend die. His sisters waited for Jesus, but while they waited nothing happened, no friendly voice at the door, no hurrying-in rabbi, no last-minute touch and saving prayer. Their deeply loved brother was dead, and buried.
Death is as regular visitor as ever it was. The global mortality rate remains stubbornly at 100%, despite all we can do and our advances in medical practices. I will die. You will die. Your nearest and dearest will also die. People that we love and entrust the future of our world to will die. Here today, gone tomorrow, just like Lazarus. This for me is the core leit motif of this gospel tale: death stalks each one of us. And, as sure as night follows morning, we will each have to walk that walk, heading away from all that we know, down that lonely valley, never to be seen of nor ever heard again.
For most of us, most of the time, we can simply not think about it. Or we can suppose nonsense in order to get away from this stubborn destination of our life. Leo Tolstoy, in his epic tome War and Peace tells of a man who is struck down during a huge military battle. He is consumed by tales of heroism, desperate to die like a hero in a life-size oil painting, to be wept over by dewy-eyed women and honoured by proud generals and kings. Tolstoy writes,
“Prince Andrew felt a tremendous blow to the head. “What has come over me? I cannot stand - my legs have given away …” And he fell on his back. Presently he opened his eyes. But he saw nothing but the deep, far-away sky above him, with light grey clouds sailing lazily across it. “What peace! What rest!” he thought. “It was not so just now when I was running and shouting - the clouds were not floating so then, in that infinite space! How is it that I never noticed those endless depths before? How glad I am to have seen them now - at last. Everything is a hollow delusion except that … Thank you God for this peace - this silent rest …”
But, he is not dead; only stunned, lying on his back in painless shock, staring up through his still open eyes at the endless sky above him. This is not death. No-one outside stories for little boys dies heroically, painlessly, considering the immensity of space. Real life-and-death is simply not like that. There is nothing natural in life as it ends in death, except that all lives will each end in their own unique but all-too-soon way.
If when still very much alive you have the chance to ponder death - perhaps as you are recorded pontificating on a YouTube group podcast, it hurts not a whit to show your mental prowess over this annoy flea, Death. The leading New Atheist Richard Dawkins is recorded as saying,
“I am content to live without knowing. Understanding is overrated."
A strangely unreasonable stance for a Prince of Reason. It is not that we will understand our death, for death comes to the least and the greatest. Richard will, perhaps soon, experience the one-way door of death. Then he will know what he says he does not wish to know, whether he wants to or not.
The greatest Science Fiction writer of the 10th century, Isaac Asimov, offered us a mixture of fact and fallacy,
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."
Life for him may have been pleasant, but it was not for the terrified young Israelis held for years in appalling conditions in the dungeons of Gaza. Many knew nothing but fear, pain and anguish until the day when a Hamas terrorist blew their brain apart. If the life of Asimov was pleasant, he should not think that he was in any way typical.
And, a peaceful death? C S Lewis knew he was writing fiction in the last Narnia book, The Last Battle, when the children all die in a train crash, but only experience a sudden jolting movement, literally escaping the horrific train crash to be taken back to Narnia, for the final journey to the great pleasantry of Aslan’s Land. If you are destined to die in a train crash it might equally be the most terrifying and shocking experience at the end of life. Yet, I have known a few who have died quietly, in a hospice, under the care of professionals. A few.
Epicurus, writing at the pinnacle of Greek philosophical thought just a few centuries before Christ, Considered it not worth considering this not-a-thing, Death. He brushed it away saying,
“Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not."
He concluded that life was for living, so we must each experience the maxima of life’s experiences before it ended. He denied the Greek gods (literally an atheist) and all their mythological paraphernalia. He denied that Hades - the god of the land of the dead, spoken of by Homer - existed, and in so doing the Hebrew place of the dead, Sheol, and the land of shades, Tartarus where the dead continued their existence beyond this land of flesh and time.
But, there is an unsatisfying feel to this kind of ‘we don’t talk about Bruno’ approach to the sudden deathly full stop that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. And, although we may brass neck our way down into the grave, many will stand at the deep, dark trench and howl their insistence on staying. Dylan Thomas, the great Welsh poet wrote,
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Some may rage out of persistence, others out of fear. Even one of the greatest lives of our age, the statesman Gandhi who led India out of her 300 year bondage to the British Empire, living a life of sanctity and peace said,
“For the first time in 50 years, I find myself in the slough of despond. All about me is darkness. . . I am praying for light. ”
And the greatest of Christian saints have often met death as a housebreaker, while God is silent and hidden in the darkest shadows. Millions of Christians went to their deaths in the European wars of many centuries, murdered by patriotic murderers, religious fanatics either face to bloody face or by a press of a switch unleashing random death on them from afar.
To return to Count Tolstoy, he slipped into the nineteenth century fad of Freemasonry; he wrote,
“There are seven precepts. The seventh is ‘the love of death’. Think often of death that it may lose its terrors for you and cease to seem an enemy. It will, on the contrary, appear as a friend, to deliver the soul wearied out by the works of virtue and from this life of misery, and to guide it to the realm of reward and peace.”
Writing while he was still very much alive, he entrusted his post-death condition to be consequential on his pre-death life. Unlike Epicurus, who told us to ignore death and instead just live blindly, Freemasonry taught that there was some kind of mystical link between our life today and our reward after this life was over. All we had to do was just to try harder to be a better person. Tolstoy gave away all his inherited wealth. Yet, years later he still wrote, “Death is terrible.”
Death remains stubbornly our universal fate. Anton Levey, who incarnated the religion of Satanism and was a self-appointed high priest of the Evil One died in terror,
“Oh my, oh my, what have I done, there is something very wrong. . . there is something very wrong. ”
If you have read thus far, then you are allowed to stop in shock. For well beyond the mere chunter and sayings of the would-be wise, this Death stands as a very real door out of here and into a there. Perhaps it has been worse for those who have used their time here in mockery of Death or his emissaries. Again, Lewis in The Last Battle tells of a sly ginger cat who believes there to be nothing supernatural, flounces into a tent of a Baal, only to yowl in terror, rushing out, fur aflame with fear, pelting away shrieking into the dark night, never to be seen again.
On his death-bed, Thomas Payne, a leading figure in the French Revolution, and in the early days of the American colonies was the author of the atheist epic, The Age of Reason said,
“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”
Yet, perhaps more rarely cited, on his death bed he added the postscript,
“Stay with me, for God’s sake; I cannot bear to be left alone , O Lord, help me! O God, what have I done to suffer so much? What will become of me hereafter? I would give worlds if I had them, that The Age of Reason had never been published. 0 Lord, help me! Christ, help me! No, don’t leave; stay with me! Send even a child to stay with me; for I am on the edge of hell here alone. If ever the Devil had an agent, I have been that one. ”
And we are confronted by a horrific hint that beyond the one-in-none-out door called Death, there is something that can be seen. Perhaps it is the testimony of those who had every reason to believe that Death was merely a full stop. A th-th-that’s-all-folks ending as we each leave the stage forever. There are many testimonies from Christians who seem to have experienced something of the beyond-now. I would include myself, but I too came back unharmed, if a tad shocked. The Door that Lazarus and later Jesus went through was to all intents and purposes the usual one-way in, with no way out.
The most murderous tyrant in human history, who had tens of millions killed, was the Georgian Bolshevik Josef Stalin. His daughter, who died a Christian, was there as he died. She recorded this in an article published in Newsweek,
"My father died a difficult and terrible death. . . God grants an easy death only to the just. At what seemed the very last moment, he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry. His left hand was raised, as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was full of menace. . . the next moment he was dead.”
I can’t draw this reflection to a close without acknowledging the central role that my beloved Scotland has had in spreading the false and hopeless religion of atheism. David Hume was the Christopher Hitchins of his day, tearing into his religious contemporaries via his writings in philosophy, empiricism and skepticism. His works are still read and deeply honoured. Yet he cried aloud on his death bed "I am in flames!". It is said that his desperation was a horrible scene for those who were there as he died.
And, to cross the debatable lands of the border, and head south towards England, we can meet the acts and words of Sir Francis Newport. He led the English Atheist Club, and he died in torment and terror,
"You need not tell me there is no God, for I know there is one, and that I am in his presence! You need not tell me there is no hell. I feel myself already slipping. Wretches, cease your idle talk about there being hope for me! I know I am lost forever! Oh, that fire! Oh, the insufferable pangs of hell! Oh, that I could lie for a thousand years upon the fire that is never quenched, to purchase the favour of God and be united to Him again. But it is a fruitless wish. Millions and millions of years will bring me no nearer the end of my torments than one poor hour. Oh, eternity, eternity forever and forever! Oh, the insufferable pangs of Hell!”
To close, just why have I related all these words? Is it to smugly outdo the atheists? No, it is intended to remind my fellow Christians that we live in a time encultured and marred by an all-present atheism. If we do not realise the real terror that lay for the writer and earlier readers of the story of the death of Lazarus, we are doomed to end up analysing away the deep spiritual, indeed, mystical meaning of this story of Death and Resurrection.
And, if it has helped some to be reminded that one day, soon, they too will die, then I am content to have written these words. For, in truth, we will each die, and be resurrected by Jesus Christ, to stand before the bar of his divine judgement. And none of us will, unlike Lazarus, get a second bite at the cherry.
