THE FEAR OF DEATH.......................AAARGH!!
A sermon preached at ST.LUKE’S church QUEEN’S PARK BRIGHTON on 30TH January 2022. Text: Hebrews 2.14-end
Since the children share flesh and blood, Jesus shared the same things so that He might free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.
The fear of death - a fascinating subject, of concern to everyone I strongly suspect.
First of all, do we mean your death or the death of someone you don’t want to lose.
I remember when I was a 9 year old at boarding school, my mother included in a letter a propos of something or other the phrase “when I’m over the hills and far away”. I was suddenly having to focus on the fact that my parents were going die. I was an only child and found the idea incredibly threatening. But of course this was my perspective, my prospective loss. The problem was not death, it was bereavement. How was I going to cope with it as a living being still very much of and in this world?
Your own death is a completely different type of challenge.
Do we mean being afraid of dying or being afraid of being dead?
Being afraid of the process of dying is usually associated with a dread of pain which can of course be suffered in a fatal accident or a fatal act of violence. Pain resulting from a fatal disease is usually alleviated by morphine or other drugs and the terminally ill patient slips in and out of consciousness.
Being afraid of being dead is entirely different. It is the fear that life as we know it, the only life we have ever lived, will suddenly stop and be removed, whisked away.
When we are children, we have a strange, illogical but very strong feeling that we are the exception to the rule. That despite old or older people, grandparents etc, being laid to rest at funerals we are dragged along to, WE are somehow going to live for ever.
From our 20s onwards, we maybe settle down, get married, have a family and our own inevitable mortality comes into the picture, concerning us about how we can provide for our dependents.
When we get to our mid-sixties and beyond, we find that our contemporaries – school friends, work colleagues – are beginning to die and we start to wonder who will be next. But at the same time funnily enough the older you get, the less frightening the prospect of death becomes. The opposite of the childlike “I’m the one who’ll live for ever”. Now it’s “I can’t think of anything worse than being stuck in this life in this world for eternity”.
However much life expectancy increases through breakthroughs of medical science, we are all going to die, whether it’s at 60, 90 or 120. Then what happens? That’s the $64,000 question!
Is it oblivion? Extinction? Reverting to the state of non-conscious non-existence before we were conceived in our mother’s womb?
Or is there some on-going form of existence which survives bodily death?
I’m not going to get into Buddhist theories of re-incarnation but I am now going to examine our Christian beliefs about an afterlife.
Human beings are, we are told, the only species on earth who have the awareness that their mortal lives are going to end. Humanity has therefore over the centuries spent a great deal of time pondering the meaning of life and death. The point has been powerfully made by theologian Austin Farrer that, simply by giving us this awareness the creator has in a sense “shown His hand” – has hinted at an afterlife. Otherwise, the awareness itself would be a cruel burden.
But of course, when we start to examine the possible nature of an afterlife, and to glean what pointers we can about it from the books of the bible, we get into a mess, a typically human mess.
Will there be a bodily resurrection at some future date for which we wait in a state of suspended animation? That seems very hard to imagine, given what we know about how our bodies decompose, even if they’re not immediately reduced to ashes.
So is it rather that the soul becomes detached from the body at death and continues a life of its own? That seems more plausible and it accords with the thinking of Plato and other ancient Greeks.
Suppose we go for that idea. What happens to the soul? Some people think it goes straight to heaven or hell for all eternity, its destination being determined by a final judgment at the moment of death on how we have behaved in this life.
That seems pretty harsh, considering none of us is perfect and all of us are sinners.
So other people, and I count myself among them, think that death is a staging post and the soul has an onward journey of further purification until we are sufficiently purged of our faults and have come to love God strongly enough to be able to withstand seeing His glory face to face and dwell in His presence, which is to say in heaven.
And where does that leave hell? Is it a place of permanent torment where sinners are perpetually tortured to punish them for their sins?
I’m sorry but I could not bring myself to believe in a so-called “loving”god who would want to set up such an infernal institution. Would such a god be worth believing in? Would such a god deserve to be believed in except out of craven terror.
I’m fairly sure such a god only exists in the sick imagination of those who are “projecting” (as the psychologists say) their own morbid self-hatred or, more worryingly, hatred of others.
Is the concept of hell meaningless, then? Oh no. It is the state of miserable lonely self-isolation which afflicts those souls who continue to reject the compassionate forgiveness of God until – eventually one hopes - His loving-kindness at last overwhelms them.
And finally, and most importantly, how does Our Lord Jesus Christ fit into this whole picture?
Well, let’s start by going back to the reading from Hebrews.
Why did He come down to earth?
Not to “help angels”, as the writer charmingly puts it, but to rescue the children of Abraham – and that’s all of us.
He made a sacrifice of atonement for our sins. In other words, He reconciled us to God by allowing us to put Him to death, to be our scapegoat. And by His own death, He rescued us from the finality of death.
But the loving self-sacrifice of the crucifixion is not the whole story. The resurrection was inevitable because He is God. He has the power and the gift of immortal life. Read all about it.
In John’s prologue IN HIM WAS LIFE AND THAT LIFE WAS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.
In John 14, He says to Martha I AM THE WAY, THE TRUTH AND THE LIFE. WHOEVER BELIEVES IN ME, EVEN THOUGH THEY DIE THEY WILL LIVE.
You see, Jesus is the life. He has eternal life. And He has the gift of that life for us.
As I say to people at funerals, time is part of eternity and eternal life starts here and now, sitting in the crematorium chapel or wherever. If we believe on Jesus, it is eternal life we are now already living.
The only way we ignorant mortals can imagine the kingdom of heaven is to consider what its earthly equivalent would be. In other words, how it would feel here and now if we all lived according to God’s law of love. Fluffy clouds and harps are neither necessary nor desirable.
The only thing we know about hell is that we put ourselves in it, like sending ourselves to Coventry, by selfishly and stubbornly resisting God’s law of love.
And what do we know about Jesus? That He is the only answer to the riddle of life and death.