dying to live

“We fret at the inevitable realization that our existence is limited….We look frantically around for assurances on this side of the moment when they will all be stripped away, anxiously busying ourselves to snatch at life before we die….All evil begins with the fact that we will not thankfully accept the limitation of our existence where we should hope in the light of it, and be certain, joyously certain, of the fulfillment of our life in the expectation of its end”—Karl Barth

“Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”—Mark 8:35-36

At 45 I’ve already outlived Jesus by a good twelve years, so all in all I’ve done pretty well.

I say this with my tongue only halfway in my cheek, for over the last few weeks I’ve been given numerous hints that faith in Christ ought to be my ticket out from under death’s shadow, rather than the light that guides me through it. I’ve received more than one set of instructions on meditation techniques for forcing cancer cells out of my body. And sitting on my desk until recently was a three-page list of Bible verses promising that God would keep me from dying. I take this to mean either that the nine billion or so people who have lived and died up to this point just didn’t get it, or that they had passed some arbitrary number of years after which these verses no longer apply.

But these biblical promises of victory over death draw their meaning from someone who was willingly crucified at an age when most of us are still wondering what we want to be when we grow up. In Christ we see that overcoming death consists not in postponing it as long as possible, but in staring straight at it and denying its power to destroy our souls.

I need to word this carefully, because I am certainly not suggesting that there is any moral or spiritual value in rushing into death. To be alive is such a gift, and to prolong and make the most of one’s lifespan merits every responsible action. But I’m convinced that the real beauty of an individual life derives from its being interwoven into a larger narrative, a narrative that belongs to God and ends in the redemption and reconciliation of the world. To know oneself as a part of that story is to recognize the splendor of one’s temporal limitations, for it is our mortality that teaches us to relinquish the rights to our own private histories and to see the larger story for which God has claimed us. Longevity, prosperity and freedom from pain are certainly goods worth pursuing, but when we elevate them to the status of ultimate goods they distort our vision of what is truly good and rob us of our humanity.

In her book Healing a Broken World (a wonderful book, by the way, which I’m assigning to students in my upcoming ethics course), Cynthia Moe-Lobeda calls attention to a shift in Western anthropology that has made it more difficult for us to recognize ourselves as part of God’s larger story. The classical Christian view of the human individual was as “man-in-communion.” To be human meant to be in fellowship with other humans, with the rest of creation, and with the Creator. To the extent that we removed ourselves from this larger community, we alienated ourselves from our own true personhood. However, new anthropologies, arising from the Enlightenment, focused more on the autonomous individual than the communities to which he or she belonged. “Man-in-communion” came to be replaced by homo economicus, the individual who acts rationally to maximize self-interest. Individual self-fulfillment and the augmentation of one’s own happiness came to be seen as the purpose of human existence.

But this has proven to be a violent and despairing view of human nature—violent because it pits us against each other, each in defense of his or her own interests; despairing because there is no reason to hope for anything larger than self-interest. To understand our lives in terms of personal self-fulfillment gives death tremendous power over us, for we have so much to lose and nothing beyond our own lives to rejoice in. So we do whatever we must to protect ourselves and our families. We hoard in fear of someday going without. We use violence to eliminate those whom we consider threats. We compete against others to establish our place in the social order. We busy ourselves in activities centered on self-interest and self-aggrandizement with little thought for whether our activities serve either to bless or to curse other members of the community of creation, whether we have been tools for good or evil, whether we have created greater peace or hostility, justice or injustice.

So Jesus presents us with a decision, either to hold onto one’s life as one’s own private possession or to release it into the service to the Reign of God for which it was created in the first place. Whichever we choose, we are bound to come across an immeasurable variety of joys and regrets during our time on earth. But there really will come a moment when we realize that to the extent that we have privatized ourselves—cherished, protected, nurtured and indulged our personal existence as an end in itself—we have eliminated ourselves from the community of the living; and that to the extent that we have released ourselves, our brief lives have been folded into the living movement of God’s Spirit, who continues to heal and to bless and to redeem from one generation to the next.