Isaiah 25.6-9, Revelation 21.1-6a, John 11.32-44
Sourton, Bratton Clovelly, Germansweek, All Saints’ Day, 4 November 2012
I’d like to begin today’s talk where I ended yesterday’s sermon at the funeral of Ron Hopkins. With these words from the Wisdom of Solomon (1:13-15):
‘God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living.’
This is an astonishing statement to us, especially in this season of All Souls’, All Saints’, and Remembrance where death is our focus, death is our theme, when many people’s religious instincts are stronger than at any other time of the year, in our heartfelt appeals to God to sanctify death, to numb its pain. If God did not make death, has he any power over it? Why pray to him over the souls of the departed?
Solomon also says, ‘The generative forces of the world are wholesome’. We might question this, after a week where the news media has often used biblical language to describe the terrifying effects of Storm Sandy [1]. And Solomon writes, ‘The dominion of Hades is not on earth’. But ‘hell on earth’ well describes what life seems like for those who are suffering from a chronic illness or facing the death of a child, it describes what whole societies are going through in lands troubled by economic decline and political unrest.
If God did not make death, if the generative forces of the world are wholesome, then why does it hurt so much that a loved one has died, why is there so much suffering in the world? [2] Solomon isn’t avoiding these questions, he’s addressing them head on. He’s inviting us to look at death in a whole new way. He is doing what other biblical writers do: revealing this astonishing truth - that death does not figure in the ways of God.
The prophets foretold it - Isaiah offers his listeners a vision of a renewed society. ‘On this mountain’, he writes, God will host a lavish feast for a forgiven and liberated people. And ‘on this mountain’ God will destroy the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations.’
What is it that hangs like a heavy storm cloud over the peoples of the earth, which God will remove? It is death: ‘He will swallow up death forever,’ Isaiah says. Death does not figure in the ways of God; he removes it from above us. We do not need to live under its oppressive weight, its threat, its curse. How different this is from the prophets of today who foretell doomsday destruction, where humanity exhausts all natural resources and the world descends into chaos.
But the Apocalyptic writers in scripture affirm that ‘death will be no more’. In the climactic 21st chapter of the Book of Revelation, God invites his people to anticipate their liberation from the mourning and crying and pain of the old world, to be ready to celebrate the coming of God’s new creation, a new heaven and a new earth, to expect to be living in his presence in a new Jerusalem, a place of undefiled love, ‘prepared as a bride adorned for her husband’. How different this is from the post-apocalyptic films and books and computer games of today, where a shattered world is peopled by the undead: zombified survivors in a condition similar to purgatory but without any hope of heaven.
Perhaps the penultimate statement in scripture about God being outside death, is this command of Jesus, having drawn his dead friend Lazarus out from his reopened tomb: ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’ In Christ, no-one is bound by death. You know the ultimate statement which scripture makes on this subject: the empty tomb of Jesus discovered by Mary Magdalene and the disciples.
It seems to contradict the spirit of our season, of All Souls’, All Saints’, and Remembrance, but in the face of the evidence of scripture we must affirm that Christ empties tombs, that Jesus unbinds the dead and lets them go. We must embrace a future in which ‘death will be no more’ and in the meantime we must permit God to remove from us ‘the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations’: the heavy weight of death which oppresses us. And we must learn to live as if death is not.
Now please hear me when I say that this does not mean that we should not mourn; this does not mean that we should not remember our dead. Switch back to the story of Lazarus and that unique picture of Jesus at the graveside - weeping. Jesus wept at the loss of his friend, and the onlookers said, ‘See how he loved him.’ When you weep, Jesus weeps with you. When you stand before a stone memorial to remember the dead, Jesus stands there with you.
Learning to live unbound by death means learning to embrace life as fully as we can. Paul wrote to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 4:16-18), ‘We do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.’ He encourages the believers to see that our sufferings in life are ‘a light momentary affliction [which] is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.’
Learning to live unbound by death is a lifetime’s work. For we are so bound by a culture which is weighed down by death, the fear of death, the use of death as threat, the endless cycle of death through violent retaliation, it is hard to be unbound, and let go from such powerful forces.
Yet at that moment when Mary Magdalene discovered an empty tomb, our world began to learn to live unbound by death, and the influence of the resurrected Christ is everywhere to see. So we can now be critical of death - we can stand at our war memorials with integrity whilst in two minds about the purpose of our ceremonies - questioning the carnage of the trenches whilst honouring those lost. And we can now redefine death, in terms like those of the German theologian Dorothee Sölle who said that ‘Death is what takes place within us when we look upon others not as gift, blessing or stimulus but as threat, danger, competition. It is not the final departure we think of when we speak of death; it is that purposeless, empty existence devoid of genuine human relationships and filled with silence, anxiety and loneliness.’ [3]
So learning to live unbound by death means being encouraged that in Christ, your life has purpose; that in Christ, you are in a deep relationship of love with him which equips you to develop flourishing relationships with others; your life is full when it is unbounded.
‘God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living.’
Let us embrace this terrifyingly powerful truth, and let us cultivate this attitude to life which Paul expressed to the believers in Rome:
‘If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.’ (Romans 14.8)
Notes
[1] BBC website, Hurricane Sandy coverage, October-November 2012
[2] I am grateful to Luis Rodriguez, Hanford Sermons, for his Pentecost 5: "God Did Not Make Death", which influenced this section of my sermon.
[3] Dorothee Sölle, The mystery of death. Translated by Nancy Lukens-Rumscheidt and Martin Lukens-Rumscheidt. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), p. 121. Quoted in Virginia Sloyan, A Sourcebook about Christian Death (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1989), p.49.
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