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Charles Wesley wrote a hymn in the late 1700’s that became quite popular during the American Civil War. Its first line is “And am I born to die?” That was quite a pertinent question back then. Wars abounded. Plagues. Sicknesses for which there were no cures. You could die at sea on the way to that new land where you were hoping to make a new start or get killed by the inhabitants once you got there. Kicked by a horse. Attacked by a wild boar. Childbirth. Life expectancy then was around 30 yrs. Life was short and Death (capital D) abounded. Wesley wrote:
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 or a plague to wonder if the sum total of your life is simply death. The question should hit us every now and then but we tend to be occupied with other questions. When we are young, 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 of resurrection that God gives us in Christ Jesus. If we don’t, we will perish in the despair of Wesley’s pointed question – Am I born to die?
Well, are we? Are we just 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 in 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 can build little rovers that explore the surface of Mars, we build weapons of mass destruction. We can write wonderful works of literature but also the propaganda that leads to genocide. That’s how we to tend treat people different from us. Do I really need to go into how we lie to, hide from, blame, manipulate, betray, 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. So, therefore, there’s no use in calling another person or their actions evil until we’ve sorted through ourselves and our own actions and miraculously found ourselves guiltless and without shame. Guiltless and without shame doesn’t describe anybody I know much less myself.
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. Like addicts 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 the way things are supposed to be in a world where humans are to live in the image of God. 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 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, that “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 publicly 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, death 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 is that the life of God, the Holy Spirit is now poured upon us.
God is flooding us with his very life and being and thereby 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. We rather live forth from the new life of faith, hope, and unconditional love that we find God has gifted to us, life filled with 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, dignity-restoring work of healing this broken, hurting and indeed, dying world. We call this day Good because by Jesus’ death, God gives us life. Let us gratefully live it for him. Amen.
