The Child Is Not Dead

Deathless

Propers: The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 13), A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

God did not make death.

Every time I read that, it takes the wind out of me. I feel like I just have to sit down and process for a bit. God did not make death. Imagine the implications.

Our whole world is an engine that runs on death. The universe as we know it is a closed system. There’s only so much energy, which burst forth in the Big Bang. And that energy collapsed into particles; and those particles into atoms; and those atoms into simple molecules. And when they had cooled enough, those molecules fell together by the magic of gravity into the great star-forges, where titanic natural forces rip and crush atoms together to produce heavier elements and unlock the raw nuclear power of the cosmos.

That’s what solar power is, after all: it’s just nuclear power viewed from a safe distance.

And then, in this cascading surfeit of energy, life arose in all its complexity—an accident of chemistry, a blip of entropy, an act of Providence. And all we that know of life in this world takes its life from something else. The plants draw it from the sun; the herbivores draw it from the plants; and the carnivores draw it from the herbivores. Thus we eat, and thus are we eaten. Yet it’s always the same energy, the echo of that Big Bang, drawn into us, passed out of us.

When the energy flows through our complex chemical reactions, we live. When the energy ceases to do work, we die. And all the while the universe is working towards heat death, its ultimate entropy, when all energies will be equally distributed and equally useless; like some brobdingnagian spring slowly unwinding, one big clock forever ticking down.

In our world, life is death and death is life. Indeed, life, it seems, is just a type of death. And so sooner or later, death wins.

But here we read the impossible: God did not make death. We did. We invited it in, we and our confederates in hell. And this would seem to demand of us a far greater understanding of life, of death, of our place within this world. Is it that the universe was not meant to be limited, to have only one Big Bang of power, one blast of the piston, which must inevitably fizzle out like fireworks in the dark? Or is it that life is more than chemistry, and death more than our end?

I cannot say for sure. All I know is that the world, as it is, is not as it ought to be, nor as it was meant to be. We can see that, we alone amongst the beasts. And we can see that, I imagine, because we’re the ones who broke it. But God did not make death, which means that death is not a thing. It is not real, has no substance in and of itself. Death is the aberration, the blip, the unintended detour. For God, death is a bubble about to burst, to collapse back upon itself.

For God there is no contest between death and life. For Him, life is real, and death is not. As cold is just the lack of heat and darkness lack of light, so death is merely lack of life, a void to be fulfilled, a corner of canvas yet to be painted. And I’m not sure if we’re to understand this revelation physically or spiritually or metaphorically. Honestly, when it comes to God, I think the walls between realities dissolve into His One Great Truth. The spiritual is the real. The physical is the metaphor.

But whatever the underlying reality, we’re simply to know that it’s true: God did not make death. And He takes no delight in the death of you.

It seems universally human that in psychology, spirituality, and religion, birth is always the sign of death, and vice versa. We see echoes of this in the aforementioned flow of natural life from one being to another. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, water likewise represents both death and new birth. Think of the waters of Creation. Think of Leviathan, whom God made “for the sport of it.” And think of your own Baptism, whereby you and I and all of us were drowned to who we were, drowned in our sins, that we might arise with the life of the Risen Christ burning within us, all around us, and through us.

Every death leads to resurrection, every cross to the open tomb. What we think is our end is never our end. That’s true of the Church, of our congregation, and of each and every one of us here. Life goes on. Life rises, again and again. To quote Malachy McCourt, the Irish have a certain attitude about death: it isn’t fatal.

And this truth, scandalous as it may be, brings me vast comfort, a deep salving of my soul. When someone dies unexpectedly, tragically, God did not will that. God did not intend for that. God did not make death. What a cry of defiance this is! It is the clarion call for which we all long, which we all know deep within to be true, yet the one we barely dare allow ourselves to believe.

In our Gospel this morning we read of perhaps the greatest of all human tragedies: a parent who lost his child, a father whose little girl had died. My God. I can’t imagine that pain. I don’t want to imagine. God knows it would break me. We almost lost one of ours, and that will haunt me to the day I die. As I’ve often told our Confirmation students, before we all have children, everyone has a different greatest fear; but after we have children, it’s all the same fear.

And what does Jesus do, when He hears this girl has died? He dismisses it. He ignores it. He refuses even to dignify her death with His acknowledgement. And it’s not because He’s callous! It’s not that He doesn’t care. He cares more than any of us. He cares even more than that girl’s own poor father. What He refuses to do is to recognize death as a thing, as a substance, as a sovereign power. “The child is not dead,” He says. Death is not real. He did not make it. And it evaporates before God on earth like shadows before the sun.

Jesus calls her: “Little girl, get up!” And just like that, at His simple word, she rises up from death. Her body is whole. Her soul is alive. And she is returned to her father, returned to her family, returned to the living who love her and weep. As there is no darkness where there is light, as there is no cold where there is heat, so there is no death where Christ is King! And someday He will be King of all.

Let me be clear: this was not some isolated event. Jesus raising this man’s daughter was never a once-and-done miracle, and one-time offer. This is who He is! This is what He does! He raises the dead; He conquers hell; He puts all the shadows of the grave to flight! We have all lost loved ones. We have all mourned and wept and known deep in our bones, deep in our souls, that this is wrong, that death is wrong, that we were meant to live and love and rise endlessly to bliss. So where then is our miracle?

C.S. Lewis wrote that everything Jesus does, all of His earthly miracles, are really things God does for all of us, but sped up. God turns water into wine for everyone; in Jesus He simply does it faster. God heals our wounds every day; in Jesus He simply does it faster. So imagine what that must mean for the resurrection of the dead. These miracles are but the foretaste, the preview, the glimpse of Kingdom Come.

There will come a day when all the dead shall arise!—when flesh and bone and soul shall live again, freed from the impediments of feebleness and pain, freed from the illusory dominion that death holds over all our earthly lives. And the joy of that father will then be our joy, the joy of our reunion, the joy of love reborn—the triumph of the Risen Christ over sin and death and hell, when all things shall be put under His feet, the last enemy to be defeated will be death, and God at last will be all in all.

God knows what it is to lose a Son, and He will not abandon us to the same. Someday every father will be reunited with his child. And in Christ we will know joy without limit, and life without end.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.