By George “Chip” Hammond
The out-of-season death of someone you dearly love and with whom your life is bound up has an effect that is more like a physical injury than it is like having a really bad day. When you have a really bad day, you can through (hopefully true) self-talk turn your attitude around and change the day. But if you’ve broken your back, it won’t matter what attitude you cultivate toward the yard work. You simply can’t do it.
Not that attitude is unimportant even with physical injury. Doctors have long noticed that people recover, or recover better and more quickly, with a positive attitude than with an attitude of despair. But healing takes time, and while a bad attitude may hinder it, a good attitude will not negate the injury and the need for healing to take place before you can move on again.
Many things in this fallen world can beat us to the ground: betrayal by a trusted friend, loss of earthly security or income, false accusation that looks like it will stick, or being the victim of adultery or abandonment. But death is a particularly cruel severance. Rather than the unmasking of someone you thought was a friend, it separates true friends and true loves. And in this age, other evils can be remedied; this one is permanent.
Contemplating the deaths of her first and second husbands, Elisabeth Elliot reflected upon some thoughts she’d collected from others and wrote: “There is the sunlight lying in patches on the familiar carpet just as it did yesterday. The mail comes, the phone rings, Wednesday gives way to Thursday, and this week to next week, and you have to keep getting up in the morning. ‘Life must go on, I forget just why.’”
Even short of the death of a beloved one, however, sometimes we come to the place where we feel like, “Life must go on, I forget just why.” Paul briefly had such a moment as he wrote to the Philippians from a jail cell.
By the time Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians he had been a herald of the gospel for nearly three decades. Paul knew false accusation, he knew betrayal and disappointment, and he knew suffering. He knew friends who had lost their lives for their testimony to Christ. As he contemplated his situation, and whether the outcome of his imprisonment would be deliverance or death, he wrote, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live on in the flesh that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:21-23).
It’s a strange statement, a hypothetical issue over which Paul really has no prerogative. He contemplates which he shall choose. But in fact, no one righteously chooses the time of his or her death. Even those who engage in heroic actions which they know imperil their lives, such as charging a machine gun nest or jumping into frigid water to lift a baby into the boat, are not choosing their death, and in fact they may not die. Paul’s hypothetical shows that he is weary.
Death is a confusing reality within Christian theology. On the one hand, human death came into the world through sin (Genesis 3, Romans 5:12). It is the wages of sin (Romans 6:23). Those who hate divine wisdom love death (Proverbs 8:36). Death is an evil in the world, and the Last Enemy to be overcome (1 Corinthians 15:26). It is the last of “all the bad things [that will] become untrue.”
On the other hand, to depart and be with Christ is “better” (not “best” Philippians 1:23). If our earthly tent is torn down, we have a house in heaven which is eternal (2 Corinthians 5:1). And for these reasons the death of God’s faithful people is precious in his sight (Psalm 116:15).
How shall we reconcile this? Perhaps there is a clue in Philippians 4:8 which is best understood when translated: “When he ascended on high, he led captive what he had conquered and captured and gave gifts to the people.” The picture is one which we moderns find barbaric, but it was a common feature of the ancient world. A conquering general would shackle the surviving soldiers and as he rode back to the victorious kingdom, would hand out the spoils of war taken from the enemy to those who lined the streets to cheer them. The captured soldiers would be presented to the king, who would often use them for hard labor such as building projects, and when he was finished with them would have them killed.
In his resurrection, Jesus conquered death. He now leads it captive. It is pressed into service to benefit his people. And when the work he has for it now is done, when it is no longer of service to him, he will destroy it forever, casting it into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14).
Unlike the code of the Samurai of feudal Japan, Christianity is no death cult. The Samurai sought death, they wished for death in the prime of life before suffering came. This can never be the attitude of the Christian. After a brief flirtation with his weariness, his sadness, his suffering and pain and his expression of desire to depart and be with Christ, Paul “acquits himself like a man” (1 Corinthians 16:13), and says, “I know that through your prayers and the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance” (Philippians 1:19). “But to remain on in the flesh is more necessary on your account. Convinced of this, I know I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith” (Philippians 1:25-26).
Paul says this, I think, because he can put himself in the place of those who would lose him, as he himself contemplates his near loss of his friend Epaphroditus: “Indeed he was ill, near death. But God had mercy on him, and not only on him but also on me, lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow” (Philippians 2:27).
“Life must go on, I forget just why.” Those words echoed by such a godly saint as Elisabeth Elliot should give us pause. Evil is real and at times it slams us with the force of a tsunami. We are injured, broken, without strength and without the will to go on. But as our strength rallies, we must go on. We may bear injuries that will never fully heal here. We may be so scarred from our experiences that we will never be the same. But as soon as we find the strength to get up again and limp, we must, even if we’d rather not. To paraphrase Paul: You see, to depart and be with Christ is far better – for me. But to remain on and tend to your progress in the faith is better – for you. And so given the (hypothetical) choice here, there really is no choice.
It is possible to undergo something so traumatic in your life that it is hard to go on living. Paradoxically, doing so for the sake of others is precisely what it means to take up your cross and follow Jesus.
