The Wilful Sunflower

Yesterday, in thinking about the way charismatic Christians pray for healing, it struck me that there seems to be a subtle fear of death. Sue Prince echoed that thought when she said this in the comments:

The "name it and claim it" thing bothers me simply because I don't know any 200 year old people. We all die. We can't claim life. Life is God's to claim. All of life is God's to claim. It is a Christian's job to follow that life plan, not try to change it.

When someone is close to death's door, we pray that they will not die. Why?

Again, Michael Green (The Empty Cross of Jesus) seems to have the answer. This time, however, the distorted view is a result of focusing too much on the cross and not enough on the resurrection. For ultimately death is, as Sue says, the real healing, a passing over to true life. Too often we lose sight of this.

[Another] consequence of this disastrous separation of cross and resurrection is the silence of much of the Christian church in the face of disaster and tragedy. The early Christians went to their funerals with a real measure of joy over their departed loved ones; they saw death through the lens of the resurrection hope... They were able to hold disaster in perspective because they saw the cross, the central mystery of faith, through the light of the resurrection.

Well, is that early Christian resilient faith apparent in Christian circles today? Do clergy normally enable their congregations to face agony with at least one eye on the empty tomb? Is there in the average Christian funeral anything distinctively different in attitude from atheist funerals? I fear there is often no difference at all. And part of the reason is that we have separated the cross and the resurrection in our minds, have lightly said to a suffering friend "it's your cross, dear" and have failed to set tragedy and pain in the light of the resurrection.

Instead of a robust faith which can face suffering with quiet confidence in God who raises the dead, we have degenerated into a selfish eudaemonism which regards pleasure and good times as our right, and complains that the first tough of adversity destroys our faith.

"Why does God allow it?" would not be stilled, but it would be heard a lot less often in churches if we had not separated cross and resurrection.

Intellectually we know that Death is a defeated enemy, yet we still seem to be fighting desperately against it all the time. We still don't want to die - ironic, considering that Christ calls us to do so, to die to our sinful, selfish desires and live for Him instead.

Holding onto life in this world has, for me at least, parallels with grasping for control: I want to be in charge, to have a say in what happens to me, and I don't want to give that up. As Henri Nouwen puts it:

Dying... is a great struggle: the struggle to surrender our lives completely. But this surrender is not an obvious human response. To the contrary: we want to cling to whatever is left, and it is for this reason that there is so much anguish in dying people. As Jesus, they, too, often experience their total powerlessness as being rejected and abandoned. Often the agonizing cry: "My God, my God, why have You abandoned me?" (Matt 27:46), makes it nearly impossible to say, "Father, into Your hands I commit my spirit" (Luke 23:46).

In actual fact, far from abandoning us, God is gathering us into His waiting arms...