Talitha cum
Propers: The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost, AD 2024 B
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.
I was 24 years old when I lost count of how many people I’d watched die. At the time I was on my Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) as a hospital chaplain in a Level I trauma center. In some hospitals, chaplains appear to have rather limited duties; in others, they’ve involved at every stage of care, from routine visits through air traumas to code-blues.
I was at one of these latter facilities. I saw everything. My record, as I rather vividly recall, was six violent deaths in six consecutive hours. We all had overnights, on-calls. We also each had our regular floors to cover during the day. I dealt mostly with cancer and heart disease. And this all occurred, mind you, within about a year of having watched my father die of bone marrow cancer and my grandmother die of a ruptured aorta.
Intense doesn’t begin to describe it. I don’t suppose I’ll ever experience such things again outside of a warzone. If you ever want stories, believe me, I’ve got some that would curl your toes. But it’ll probably take a beer or two to get them out of me. I’ll tell you this much, though: at the end of the day, as a trauma chaplain, you knew you’d made a difference. You’d been there for people, helped people, in their worst moments, often their final moments. And that’ll keep you going through a lot of heartache and horror.
Since then, of course, I’ve performed many Last Rites and many more funerals; lost count of those a long time ago as well. And now my wife’s an undertaker, so you may be sensing a theme. I typically wear a black band on my left wrist—really only take it off on Sundays—with the simple Stoic motto memento mori, “remember death.” Unwritten is the countersign, memento vivere: “remember to live.”
They go hand-in-hand: the admonition to live a good life, because it has to end. We only have so much time here on earth, not merely to eat, drink, and be merry, but to do real good, to leave behind something true. Because our accomplishments will be forgotten, our monuments will crumble, our names will be lost to the drifting sands of time. But the love that we live will continue, echoing anonymously down the generations, rippling out to reach some far undreamt-of shore.
All of which is to say, I’m probably more familiar with death than most. That’s one of the reasons why I’m always struck by today’s reading from the Wisdom of Solomon: “God did not make death.” That verse only comes up in our lectionary once every three years, and I cannot let it pass. I preach on it every single time. I have to. That brash assertion stops me cold because, in spite of all that I’ve witnessed, in spite of the ubiquity of death, I believe it. It rings so true that I can’t not believe it.
I have a degree in genetics. I used to splice DNA in a lab. I know the workings of biology, of chemistry, the laws of thermodynamics. Everything tends toward heat death. There’s only so much energy in the cosmos, and as we use it, as we consume it, as it flows through us and through all things, we “waste” it. It becomes unusable, becomes heat. On a strictly mechanical level, there is no life without death. Everything feeds off of something else, until we all run out. The division between life and death is chemically nonsensical.
And yet. Life is more than merely chemistry, is it not? I’ve never rejected my scientific training. All truth is God’s truth, after all. But I’m in religion now because philosophy and faith can go beyond the merely empirical. They can ask the real questions. Why is there something instead of nothing? What is consciousness? How do we relate to that which is beautiful, good, and true? What is value; what is purpose; what is right and what is wrong? What does this all mean?
And on that level of reality, that level of awareness, I read, “God did not make death,” and I know beyond all knowing that it’s true. God is the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; subsistent existence itself; Being with a capital B. He creates; He cannot destroy. The only destruction that God can possibly work is the destruction of falsehood, of evil, of sin and of death—because those things don’t in fact exist. They aren’t real, have no substance in themselves. They are only a lack, an emptiness, of what is good and true.
There’s no such thing as cold; it’s just a lack of heat. There’s no such thing as darkness; it’s just a lack of light. And there’s no such thing as death, because it’s only a dearth of existence. And God Himself is existence, the One in whom “we live and move and have our being.” Where God is, there is no death. He creates all, remembers all, loves all. All are alive unto Him. The whole of Creation groans in pangs of labor, as we are called out from nothingness into the pleroma, the fullness of God, so that God at the last shall be all in all.
There are many logical arguments as to why this must be so, fashioned by women and men far more faithful and wiser than I. But we are not only a people of faith; we are also specifically Christian; so that everything we know of God, we find in Jesus Christ. This is more than just saying that Jesus is like God. No, far more scandalous, and far truer, is our outrageous proclamation that God is like Jesus. Whenever we want to know who God is, what He’s like, how He loves us, we as Christians look to Christ, first, last, and only.
We do not look to Abraham, nor Moses, nor David, nor even to the Prophets and the Psalms, save to find Christ in them. If they point to Jesus, they have value. If He were not there they would have none; not for us. Jesus is our God, the only Son of the only Father. He is the infinite, transcendent, and eternal made now manifest, incarnate in this Man. So what then is Christ’s relationship to death, to illness, to suffering, loss, and harm? Does He inflict them as judgment on others? Does Christ call down fire from the sky? Does He blight the land and plague the sinful? Good God, no. Not ever. Not once.
Wherever Jesus is, there is no death. In our Gospel reading this morning, a long-suffering woman comes up hoping merely to touch His robe, and she is immediately, obviously healed. He doesn’t even do it on purpose! He doesn’t even try! Just the fact that He’s there is her healing, her hope, her salvation. She is restored fully to wholeness and health. 12 years of bleeding, a wound that would have kept her from the Temple, kept her in perpetual ritual impurity, simply vanishes, like smoke on the breeze.
In a world where religious pollution spread by contact as though by infection, Jesus cannot be defiled. Rather, He spreads holiness like a contagion. Wheresoever He may go, the blind see, the lame walk, the hungry are fed, the sinful forgiven, and the lost restored in love. Yet now must Jesus face the worst of worldly pain, the deepest grief I think that anyone can feel. Jesus encounters a man who has lost his daughter, a parent outliving their child.
That’s my greatest fear. Honestly, it’s got to be the greatest fear of anyone who’s ever held a baby. The Bible can go on about dragons and demons and storms and earthquakes all the live-long day, and none of that is half so terrifying to me as this man and his daughter. So what does Jesus say? These things happen? God must’ve needed an angel? It’s all part of some inscrutable plan? Hell, no. Jesus says, “Little girl, get up.” And the girl gets up.
That’s all I need to know. You don’t need to tell me anything more about theology, theodicy, soteriology, because I now know the only thing that matters. How does God relate to death? He raises little girls. That will bring me to my knees. Yes, Lord, I will bow to that. I will worship that. I will spend my life preaching the Gospel of the One who raises every single child up from the loamy earth of the grave. And God help any soul who dares get in my way.
In the words of perhaps our greatest living theologian*:
If it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death … sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.
As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of his enemy … An utterly sincere and unrestrained hatred of suffering and death is the surest foundation of Christian hope, and the [only] proper Christian response to grief.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
*David Bentley Hart. Obviously.
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