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Charles Wesley wrote a hymn in the
late 1700’s that became quite popular during the American Civil War. It’s first line is “Am I born to die?” That is quite a pertinent question if you are
a young person not even twenty years of age and having to go fight a war that
you likely will not return from. You
don’t understand the reasons for the war but you are convinced that if you do
not fight you will lose your future and your children’s future. You join up.
You spend your days walking, starving, wet, freezing in the winter, roasting
in the summer, surrounded by the stench of too many humans in one place, and
always fearing. Then you come to battle
and the barbarity, the screaming, the manic fear, the noise, and farms and
entire cities ablaze. Having not yet
really lived and being surrounded by Death (capital D) you sing the question of
despair:
And am I born to die? To lay this body down?
And must my trembling spirit fly into a world unknown
A land of deepest shade. Unpierced by human thought.
The dreary regions of the dead, where all things are forgot?
Soon as from earth I go, what will become of me?
Eternal happiness or woe must then my portion be;
Waked by the trumpet's sound, I from my grave shall rise,
And see the Judge with glory crowned, and see the flaming skies,
Well, one doesn’t need to be in the
midst of a war to wonder if the sum total of one’s life is simply death. When we are younger we ponder and dream of
what we will do with our lives. The
middle years make us wonder if we’re really doing anything useful because we’re
beginning to realize how fast the years go.
The elder years hit and we look back wondering what part in the grand
scheme of things we played? Did we make
a difference?
All along the way we are confronted by
the harsh reality of the death of friends and family. One doesn’t have to look too far to garner
the awareness that life in all its wonder and goodness has a monstrous beast
lurking about that cannot be tamed - the futility of death. One must either wear the rose-coloured
glasses of denial or gird up with the hope that God gives us in Christ Jesus or
we will perish in Wesley’s pointed question – Am I born to die?
Am I born to die? The answer to that question is an emphatic
“NO!” Death was not what God created us
for. We are fearfully and wonderfully
made as the Psalmist says, fearfully and wonderfully made to praise and to
bring praise to our awesome God who loves his creation with a love we cannot begin
to comprehend. We can appreciate the
beauty of a flower, smell hope wafting from the mud of Spring, understand the
wonders of a Black Hole, feel delight watching a baby smile, cure diseases,
play, and feel joy.
Yet, something is dreadfully wrong in
God’s very good creation. With the same
hands that will build little vehicles that explore the surface of Mars, we
assemble weapons of mass destruction. We
can write wonderful works of literature but also the propaganda that leads to
genocide. That’s how we treat people
different from us. Do I really need to
go into how we lie to, hide from, blame, manipulate, and disappoint those we
love the most. I believe it was the
fifth century theologian Augustine who was the first to say that the line
between good and evil runs through the middle of everyone.
This dreadful wrongness in God’s good
creation is the insidiously deceptive Power which we in our language call Sin. It is a disease affecting everyone, a disease
that leads to Death. We are powerless
over it. We are both its victims and
culpable of it. It is a disease that
affects the mind. It blinds us to
seeing, perceiving, and knowing. It
turns us inward with a compulsion to serve our own wants and needs. It makes us want to be our own gods and to
serve false gods in sick efforts of self-preservation. It subtly makes Good seem Evil and Evil seem
Good and with even more perversion it can turn the Good we that do into Evil
and make doing Evil the means to doing the Good.
What does God do about this perversion
of his very good Creation? Well, it was
God’s plan all along that at the right time God the Son would become the man,
Jesus of Nazareth, and crown God’s good creation with his very self. Also in this plan was God’s pouring the Holy
Spirit upon all humanity and upon his creation perfecting it so that what
Isaiah prophesied long ago would be true, “the Earth will be full of the
knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11:9). But, with God’s good creation infected with
the disease of Sin and powerless against it, God’s crowning and perfecting of
his creation with the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Holy
Spirit had to take the horrific form of crucifixion and death. For now the
power of God’s glory and love is seen, perceived, and known by us by the death
on the cross of Jesus, the incarnate Son
of God and Lord of all creation.
If we can say that anyone was born to
die, it was Jesus. In this act of
incomprehensible love God took upon himself our Sin diseased nature by which we
are all victimized in order to heal us of it.
He took upon himself His own judgement of condemnation against us for
our culpability in Sin and suffered the sentence of the most publically
humiliating form of criminal execution humanity has ever devised in order
deliver us from our deserved condemnation and sentence of death.
How perverted! How twisted!
How wrong! We humans in our
blindness took the one who was God’s crowning and perfecting of us and crowned
him with a crown of thorns, and enthroned him on a cross, and mocked him, and
spit on him. We judged it preposterous
and blasphemous that he claimed to be the Son of God come to deliver us. We, in the blindness of our Sin may say, “No,
it wasn’t me. I wasn’t there.” But, as Jesus taught, whatever we have done
to harm even the least of us, we have done to him. We are liars if we say we have not hurt,
harmed, and broken the trust of others especially those closest to us whom we
say we love the most.
Well, we will have to wait for Easter
for the full details of this story but by his death Jesus opened a new and
living way to God. It was on this day
that Sin and Death were condemned and sentenced to death. This is why we call it Good. The great mystery of this tragic event is that
God the Son become human as Jesus of Nazareth somehow experienced death himself
when Jesus died on the cross. God the
Father and God the Holy Spirit somehow suffered the death of God the Son. These are things too big for this small mind to
comprehend. It is enough to say that God
the Trinity knows in his very self what it is to die.
In the wake of the horrific event of
our crucifying Jesus what needs to be said is that through the death of Jesus,
the Christ, God the Son, God the Trinity has established in our hearts a new
covenant, a new way to live in response to him, a new and living way of coming
to him. The result of our Death going
into God was that the life of God, the Holy Spirit will be poured upon us. We will have to wait for Pentecost for that
part of the story.
But to spoil the plot a little, God is
flooding us with his very life and being recreating us to bear forth the living
image of Christ Jesus and his self-giving love that he modeled on the Cross. He calls us to live according to the Way of
the Cross. If there is a sense in which
we are born to die, it is that we have been born anew to live the cross-formed
life of denying ourselves and laying down our lives for others in the war
against Sin, Death, and Evil; a war that Jesus has already won. In this new life we do not simply live as
good people who live according to higher standards of morality and
altruism. No, rather it is that as we
live forth from the new life of faith, hope, and unconditional love that we
find God's continual presence with us bearing our old life away and
transforming us with Jesus life. Jesus'
once and for all death has made it possible for us to be a part of God's
life-giving, person-restoring work as we listen to Jesus with ears made alive
by the Holy Spirit whom he has poured into us making us able to trust him and
to follow.
As I started out with a hymn, I will
finish up with one. This is The Way of
the Cross Leads Home written in the more hopeful year of 1906 when missionary
fervour was sweeping the North American Church by Jessie Hunter Brown Pounds
who was the daughter of a pioneer Disciples of Christ preacher in Ohio.
I must needs go home by the way of the cross,
There’s no other way but this;
I shall ne’er get sight of the gates of light,
If the way of the cross I miss.
The way of the cross leads home,
The way of the cross leads home,
It is sweet to know as I onward go,
The way of the cross leads home.
I must needs go on in the blood sprinkled way,
The path that the Saviour trod,
If I ever climb to the heights sublime,
Where the soul is at home with God.
Then I bid farewell to the way of the world,
To walk in it never more;
For the Lord says, “Come,” and I seek my home,
Where He waits at the open door.
