God Doesn't Like Death

MARCH 29, 2020
​Is it the case that we are not to fear death, that Jesus had no interest in life for its own sake, given the prospects of eternal life? In the lectionary this week, we have the story of Lazarus, a friend of Jesus who dies. This story has Jesus comforting the family by affirming eternal life. But at the same time John says he is troubled several times. And the most memorable line in response to Lazarus’ death and the shortest scripture we have is “And Jesus wept”  Something about this life really does matter to Jesus.

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As Jesus says in Mark 12:27  God is the God of the living.

What could this mean? As a base line, we can affirm the value of this life and this world. It is not something to be held in juxtaposition to eternal life. When God created life in Genesis God said it was good.

As Divine Wisdom says in Proverbs 8
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
28 when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
29 when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
30 then I was beside him, like a master worker;[e]
and I was daily his[f] delight,
rejoicing before him always,
31 rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.

This life is a gift of God, not to be spurned as if eternal life trumps the life we are living now.
So how does one affirm eternal life and at the same time the value of life, which clearly Jesus did. Here’s one way

To go with David McReynolds, every human being is a unique personal universe of experience. A universe that can never be duplicated nor replaced. Every life experience, every set of relations, every event in such a life, every mannerism, every bit of joy and value is had by that person in the way they are that is unique to them.

And God derives joy from that experience of value in that person’s uniqueness. When that person dies, their life continues on, as a source of material God uses to build the world that God seeks. But then it is the objective content of the world as God is able to use, not an ongoing experiencing of the value of that life. So while our lives have eternal meaning and remain in God, God suffers genuine loss when we die.

That sounds poetic, but to borrow from process thought it does suggest that every event as much as it contributes to further events and to the degree they are objectified provides a permanent contribution to any kind of universe we would have and that could follow.

But life ongoing is more delightful to God than a life that was. Which is why in the end, the loss of life is a tragedy, no matter the age, the condition, the species to God. While eternal life is ours given the kind of universe we live in, the best response to God is to preserve our own life and other people’s lives. And to live those lives well and create the context in which all of us can live well into our full possibilities. That is the only means of giving meaning to eternal life.

The next best response to do remember those who have died with the sort of intimacy and care that God does.

In that, there is to me more Gospel in this Google ad, a genuine sense of what an individual life means, than any orthodoxy that would seek to be dismissive of our individual lives and life in general.
Dwight Welch is the campus minister at United Campus Ministry at Montana State University Billings