The Wolf Who Eats the World

Propers: All Saints’ Sunday (Hallowmas), AD 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

Nothing lasts forever. Stars, trees, animals, people, even the gods—everything perishes in the end. The wolf will come, and the world will burn. The wolf will devour the moon. He'll devour the sun. He'll devour everything, everything, everything that ever existed. But it's nothing you need to be scared of. Everything that begins ends eventually.

That’s a quote from Barbaren, a German historical drama about the life of Arminius, who as a boy was taken to Rome as a hostage, and there raised as a Roman citizen. When he first arrived in that ancient city, Arminius was astonished to find that the wolf he had been raised to fear—the wolf who would devour the world—was revered by the Romans as their mother, indeed as the savior of Romulus and Remus.

The thing he thought was death gave life to the strongest people he had ever known.

Everyone who lives must make peace with death. They say you’re an adult the day you truly realize that you are going to die. Animals don’t have this issue. They want to live, of course; they avoid predators and pain. But a dog doesn’t sit around thinking, “I’m getting on in years. I’d better make something of myself, do something with my life, for I haven’t much time left.” No, a dog is simply happy being a dog at whatever age.

But we’re different. We know our time is short. And this knowledge puts everything else in life in perspective. What do we want our legacy to be? What should we choose to do with the time we have? If death is the end, does anything really matter? And if it’s not the end—then what on earth comes next?

These are questions with which we all must wrestle, yet they are questions which our culture desperately does not want us to ask. We are told that such thoughts are morbid, or scary, or unhealthy. But really what they are is bad for the economy. Death reminds us that we cannot simply consume forever: forever buying, forever watching, forever craving more. We only have so much time. We only have so many resources. And it’s true what they say: you can’t take it with you.

Entire industries are committed to lying to us about mortality: dyes for your hair, cream for your wrinkles, pills for your sex life. If you get sick—whisk! Off to the hospital. If you get old—woosh! Off to the elders’ home. And if you die—when you die—it won’t be your family who washes and prepares you for burial. It’ll be outsourced, clean and antiseptic. And then after the requisite four days’ mourning period, you children’s bosses will expect them back at work.

We live in a culture in which death is absolutely taboo—unless it’s on a screen. If it’s in movies, TV, video games, then it’s permissible, because there’s distance. It’s been safely virtualized, profitably commoditized. It’s death as entertainment. But even with the force of trillion-dollar industry behind it, our denial of death can only go so far. We can only lie to our souls so much before the truth claws its way out of the grave. And for that I am thankful to Halloween.

Now it’s true: Halloween is a very commercialized holiday. It’s every bit as commodified as most representations of death in postmodern America. But there’s still that core to it, that irrepressible conviction that here is death come out to play, here is death and she will not be denied. And children get that scandalously tantalizing glimpse of what we shield them from every other day of the year.

Here is death in all her beauty and her horror, and she will not go until we deal with her.

Every culture I’ve ever studied has a festival of the dead. Every culture honors their ancestors, their forebears. And this alone is evidence that death is not the end: that the people we love still carry on, in relationship to us, even beyond the grave. There are some things death cannot kill, and the foremost among them is love.

Another, mind you, is justice. Justice has to reach beyond the grave, or else it doesn’t exist. If you could build a perfectly just society tomorrow, it would still be built atop the bones of all those who had gone before, who had died unjustly. If there is no justice, then it doesn’t matter if you live like Joseph Stalin or Mother Theresa: it would all be the same in the end. But no-one really believes that. Only a madman thinks that all things are permissible, that morality does not exist.

Evil is only a problem if death is not the end. So if you think that evil is indeed a big problem, then like it or not, some part of you believes in whatever comes next.

Christianity has never shied from death. And we sure as heck have never denied death. No matter how you glitz up a cross, cast it in gold and stud it with gems, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a cross: something you nail people to to die on. Christianity challenges death head-on, unblinking, unflinching, uncompromising in our insistence that it must be confronted, must be dealt with, and must be defeated.

Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus treat death as natural. It is never part of God’s plan. It is never the mysterious workings of His providence. Death, disease, and damnation are only ever enemies for Jesus to throw down. When He sees a sick person, He heals them. When He sees a dead person, He raises them. And when He sees a damned sinner, Jesus forgives them and welcomes them home.

And this shook us to our core. Everything we know—our entire world—is predicated on the final authority of death. Death means that violence can be the answer to our problems. Death means that people can be bought and sold as things. And death is the power of Rome, indeed of all state and secular authority. Threaten the reign of death, and you undermine our structures of power.

And so we murdered Jesus Christ, in the worst and most humiliating way that we could think of. We lashed the flesh off His back. We twisted thorns into His brow. We made Him carry His own Cross to Calvary, broken and battered as He was. And then we nailed Him to it, all the time mocking Him, berating Him, lying about Him. And when He finally gave up the ghost, with one last anguished cry, we rammed a spear into His heart just to make sure that we’d gotten the job done.

But Jesus did the damnedest thing: He forgave us. Even as we were in the midst of murdering Him, He forgave us. And then He plunged down into hell, down amongst the demons and the dead, and there preached liberation to the spirits in prison, back unto the time of Noah—when humanity’s every thought was only evil all the time.

And He filled up death to bursting with the life and light and love of God, the Spirit and the Blood of God, shattering the tomb, harrowing hell, and He rose again triumphant into heaven with all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train. Jesus took all the violence we poured into Him, all the power of death, and transformed it, redeemed it, so that our worst sin became the very instrument through which God wrought our liberation.

He turned death inside-out. He turned death into its own opposite.

For Christ is Lord of death and hell! Christ has overthrown Satan, cast him down from that mockery he called his throne. And so death, for us, is now the gate to everlasting life. We go down to the grave, yes, but our God knows the way out from the grave. There is nowhere we can go that He is not already there. If I fall down to hell, Christ is Lord. If I fly up to heaven, Christ is Lord. If I live, if I die, if I suffer, if I weep, if I rejoice, Jesus is with me through it all. I cannot escape Him, cannot flee Him. He is Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End.

He has redeemed even death—death, who had no substance; death, our great abomination; death, born from the wages of our sin. He has made her now into our sister. He has made her into a vessel of His grace. My God. There is nothing He cannot overcome, nothing He cannot redeem, no-one He cannot save. Christ has come, and will not be denied, not even by death, the devil, and hell. All lie conquered. All lie prostrate. All shall bow to Christ the King.

Jesus is the Wolf, you see. It is He who devours the sun, the moon, everything, everything that ever existed. He consumes all that we were, only to raise us to new birth in Him, to glory and mercy and peace and joy and life forever, life everlasting. Christ is our Mother, Christ is our Savior, Christ is the Wolf who eats the world.

To Him, every sinner is a saint. And in Him, every saint shall be saved.

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