Life and Death in Lent

Religion Today - Moncton Times & Transcript - February 20th 2016

The reason for Lent is, in fact, preparing for the reality of death. Good Friday is when Jesus dies horribly. The thing is, as a lot of people will tell you, we have a tendency to skip over Good Friday and move right on to Easter- the festival of light and life which declares that even death is not the end and Jesus magically returns from the grave.

Perhaps it is only natural – but we are much fonder of life than we are of death.

There is even a term, and it came up recently, “The sanctity of life” when the news started once more talking about assisted suicide. Life is holy, goes the saying, and so it should be protected at all costs. Life – apparently – is more important than all of the miraculously wonderful things that go into living.

Here is the thing. I spent a morning talking to a man who recently lost his wife. Well – she recently died after a horrific eight-month journey into hell with the rare Jakob Creutzfeldt Disease, or as we think of it, the human version of Mad Cow Disease.

Now, she had a DNR, do not resuscitate order, and they had all talked about how she did not want so-called “heroic” measures taken. But the problem came when she slipped into a coma from which she would never recover – and did not die.

The decision was taken to stop everything that was helping to keeping her alive. Which meant to take out the feeding tube. What followed was four days of starving to death…

I know, this is not a very happy topic… the thing is, I had never really thought about the fact that what actually happens is that you stop feeding them and then let them starve. It seems a horrible way to die, even if you are incurably sick already.

It was one of his final statements that stuck with me and provoked this article. “We talk about preserving the sanctity of life, but we do not talk about the sanctity of death.”

After his wife’s unnecessary suffering he became even more keenly aware of the fact that the more humane solution would have been to help her die quicker, sooner, closer to when her actual life ended.

Currently, he is a fervent advocate of the Death with Dignity movement, and a strong supporter of what the news, unfortunately, calls physician-assisted suicide but which George calls physician-assisted passing over to the great next adventure.

His argument is an interesting one – why do we think being born is a gift from god, but dying is not? Why do we think that life is to be protected at all costs, even when it is no longer worth living? Why would ending the life of a person who is brain dead, in a coma, with no chance of recovery because holes have been eaten out of their brain be called murder and come with a 17-year jail sentence?

Is it not more likely that the moral and religious answer to what would Jesus do would be to administer enough morphine to stop her heart in a second?

That too would be a tough choice to make, a tough moment of courage and letting go. But it would be the humane thing to do – and is, in fact, the human thing to do when a horse breaks their leg or a dog gets cancer. Is it more important to help a pet not suffer than a beloved family member?

Lent is a time when we think about the deeper questions of faith and what it is that keeps us from being the best possible people we can be. The truth is that Jesus saw death as the best possible way to make his point about love and life. Maybe we can stop being so afraid of death. Perhaps it is time to celebrate everything that goes into making us who we are – including our death. 

TRANSFIGURATION

There is this story in the Bible – part of the Jesus Saga, which has become known as the Transfiguration.

Here it is in a nutshell: Jesus grabs a couple of his friends and they head up a mountain to pray. While they are there Jesus starts to glow and suddenly there are two other people there – Moses and Elijah and the three of them talk. Then Moses and Elijah fade away leaving Jesus alone with the three disciples. They want to stay. They want to erect some sort of monument. But Jesus tells them it is time to head to Jerusalem and perhaps death.

There is so much going on with this brief story – even if we completely ignore the radioactively glowing Jesus in the centre of the room.

As Jesus life unfolds this is a major turning point in the stories told about him because it separates the before and after in such a concrete way.

You can look at this a number of ways, before this moment Jesus was perhaps a little closed in terms of revealing his identity… he always put off questions and said, I’m not great, God is great. But here he is revealed as somehow special.

Secondly, before this moment Jesus was always focused on the here and now, healing and teaching, going walkabout through Israel. All of a sudden he turns his eyes towards Jerusalem, to be poetic like the Gospel writer Luke. Now he starts talking about his death, and what will come of that.

Thirdly, Jesus came to reform religion. He has some new ideas… and appearing with Moses and Elijah makes him the third in a series of reformers: Moses changed the faith when he led the people to the Promised Land and established them as a nation instead of a wandering people. Elijah represents the prophets and the way Judaism changed when it became more of an established religion with religious leaders. Now there is Jesus, who has come to change it again…

See, this episode, as it is written, has a very important task of changing the focus of Jesus life. It is, one in a series of four episodes: the birth story, the baptism story, the transfiguration, the death… Each of these is meant to illustrate how Jesus was exceptional.

Moments of change – moments of transformation – and moments that happen to all of us.

This is the fourth, and most important reason the story is told: it is about us.

Transfiguration is what happens at those crucial moments in life when everything changes. We might not be up on a mountain, but think about the birth of a child, or graduating from college, getting fired and having to reinvent ourselves… there are these moments when change is forced upon us and we all of a sudden face the future with certainty and clarity of understanding.

This is what I am discovering more and more as I read stories from the Bible and think about why someone wrote them down. What is it about this story that is meant to be passed on and is important for us? Because there is always a reason, always a connecting point that illustrates some great wisdom which would make our lives better.

This is something I wish I knew before now – we are not going to stay the same… life changes us. Life moulds us into something different at crucial moments and we are no longer the same person.

Too often we are like the disciples, wanting to hold on to the past even in the face of obvious evidence that things need to be different. Too often we have change swirling around us and try desperately to hold on to the past with the delusional belief that everything should stay the same.

The story of Jesus is the story of a man who accepted that God leads in different directions and in each moment accepted that and moved on faithfully into the future. From Carpenter, to Preacher, To Martyr.

Hopefully life has a nicer ending for us, but we still need to accept that transfiguration is possible, and when the moment is right, embrace what God is calling you to be.