In the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, there is a section called, “At the Burial of a Child.” I remember the first time I saw the heading, the matter-of-factness of it felt as cold and biting as a knife; I looked over the words following and hoped against hope that no one had ever had to read them aloud. But they had. Certainly, they had.
When Christ was asked about specific instances of suffering, his answer (in the Gospel according to Luke: Ch. 13, v. 5) was simple: “[E]xcept ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” Deaths appear different; in reality, they are the same. This was John Donne’s theme when he penned one of the most famous theological and existential reflections in the history of the English language:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
The Gospel is designed for a world that is broken, a continent that has seen its better days and is now washing away, and to minister it well demands an understanding of just how broken. Tonight, someone is weeping, and no one but God knows why. Some streams of thought in contemporary Christianity, viewing the apparent diversity of suffering with which we are daily confronted, encourage us to focus on how our faith isn’t “just” about getting into heaven or escaping hell, and that perspective is well-intended—but naïve.
Heaven or hell is the basic question of human existence, and we all must face it “[f]or surely there is an end” as it is put in Proverbs (Ch. 23, v. 18). Christianity is about this time, but that is not at the expense of eternity—it is because of eternity. “And this is life eternal,” the Lord says (in the Gospel according to John: Ch. 17, v. 3), “that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” We cannot separate the eternal from time: Eternity is happening now. The apostle Paul says of believers (in his Epistle to the Ephesians: Ch. 2, v. 6), “[God] hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ.” If Christians already possess eternal life in their knowledge of Jesus Christ, if they are already (in a spiritual sense) in heaven through him, then what does that say of those who have not believed? The natural extension of the doctrine is that they are in hell already. The one who hates without remorse, the one who is wanton without loving, the one who mourns without hope—these are already in hell. The purpose of the Gospel is “pulling them out of the fire” as Jude puts it (in verse 23 of his Epistle) before the damage is irreversible.
The Gospel is necessary because of the dark parts of human existence—because we are dust, because we try our best and still fail, because we die. If these things were not true, we could live for pleasure. If these things were not true, a law and a prophet—like Moses or the Buddha—would suffice. But these things are true. We need salvation, and we have none of the means to save ourselves. That is why Jesus came—that is why our message is that Jesus came, that God came to earth and became a human because he loved us, that he bore our sins and their consequences, that he died and entered into that eternal hell, and that he rose again, assuring us that he has done everything necessary to free us from hell and to reconcile us to himself forever. That is why we teach that all we need to be saved is to believe—because that is all we can do.
To teach we need to do more would be to set up an impossible standard, leading to despair; to teach we don’t need salvation would be to deny the reality of the sin that we commit daily and the pain and death that we experience daily—leading to another kind of despair. In either case, the result is self-destruction. We see many young people today questioning consumerism and the achievement-based status quo that has come to define much of global society and entering into variance with the secular system. We also see many people eschewing organized religion—Christian traditions included—with its creeds and laws and covenants. It is because neither of these things—neither the material nor the ideal—are sufficient. Only one thing is: Jesus Christ. We need to know that our souls are eternal and that God does care about our destiny, that we are sinners but that God forgives sin, and that in his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus Christ did everything necessary to pay for our sins and reconcile us to God. Jesus is the end: The end of our searching, the end of our suffering—the fulfillment of all that is good and the abolition of all that is evil.
Photo by Laib Khaled on Unsplash
Comparing Notes 