(Mark 16:1-8)
Living forever seems, on the face of it, like a pretty desirable thing period death is generally agreed to be a bad thing, and so that would make not dying a good thing. Surely it is right to “Rage against the dying of the light,” as the poet Dylan Thomas put it? Yet when we contemplate immortality as a real possibility, we find it is a more difficult Subject than we originally imagined.
Among other things, there is the problem Douglas Adams alluded to in his sci-fi novel life, the universe and everything. He describes the predicament of “Wowbagger the infinitely prolonged … one of the universe’s very small number of immortal beings.” Wowbagger became immortal by accident and gradually found life to be a burden:
In the end, it was Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55 when you know you’ve taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.
Wowbagger is not the only person to have lived in dread of the long dark teatime of the soul. On more than one occasion during my 30 plus years of ministry, I have been approached by someone who said, “the thought of eternity absolutely terrifies me.” Each time, in response to my obviously rather confused expression, the individual has responded with something like, “I’m scared that I’ll be bored.” They go on to explain that if life is extended infinitely, then we will have a problem because the creation is finite. We will have time to meet every person, to have every possible conversation with every person, to read every book ever written, and to visit every interesting place until even the most thrilling destinations become commonplace and boring. By that point I have begun to experience some of their dread too. Maybe you can come up with a better response than my typical, “that’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.”
Perhaps we should start by thinking about God’s own immortality. That too, along with his invisibility, is part of Paul’s outbursts of praise at the beginning and end of his first letter to Timothy: 17Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen. 15God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, 16 who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen.
You see, when we talk about God as immortal, we mean something a bit different from what we normally imagine by that word. We tend to think of immortality a bit like waterproofing: you apply a certain kind of wax (or other substance) to cloth or paper to prevent water from affecting it. So rather than me getting wet in the rain, my coat keeps the water out and it just rolls off the outside. In a similar way, we tend to think of immortality in terms of being resistant to death- a quality that can be “added” to a person who would otherwise naturally be mortal. By this point in the sermon series, you might already be ahead of me thinking, “But you can’t add anything to God.” Quite right.
In the story of the Burning Bush, when God chooses to reveal His name to Moses, He says “I am who I am.” This connects to a point in an earlier message about how God is apart from His creation as the uncreated Creator of all. He is from Himself and as such everything that is true of Him is part of the definition of Him. Now this means that when we think about God’s immortality, we are talking as much about His beginning as His end. It’s not just that God can’t die; it’s that there is no sense in which He was “born.”
Whenever God describes himself, he does so in terms of the past and the future. He is a sort of bookend to reality, who was and is and is to come. The whole timeline of the universe exists within these book ends; God exists outside of them.
Immortality, then, describes the mode of God’s being. He is the one inevitable thing. Existing is who He is, not just what He does. He cannot not live, and He never has. This takes us back to my promise from last Sunday: to make sense of the fact that, though God cannot suffer, Jesus – who is fully God – did suffer. And, while I’m at it, I might as well add Jesus died, too.
For on the Friday of Passover in Jerusalem nearly 2000 years ago, darkness fell at midday. This was no eclipse-Passover was always held at a full moon when an eclipse is impossible. But the darkness came nonetheless; For three whole hours. Yet that was not the most unnatural thing about it. Ever since, Christians have taught that the son of God himself suffered and died in that moment of darkness. He who could not, by nature, possibly suffer, and who certainly could not die, nonetheless hung there suspended between earth and heaven, as his life drained away.
If it is a mystery that the invisible God should have appeared among us as one of us, it is a deeper mystery still that he should have disappeared in that manner. The darkness that fell in place of that hot Judean sunshine marked what was, truly, the strangest moment in the history of the universe. God died.
It became vital, among the Christians of the early church, to find a way of talking about this that could somehow account for its strangeness. The impossibility of this death and, yet its reality, were at the heart of God’s dealing with His people. How to make sense of it? Can we really say that God died on the cross?
After four centuries of debate within the church, Cyril, one of the great theologians of Alexandria in Egypt, argued that the answer is “yes.” As you might have anticipated, it comes down to the union of Christ’s two natures, divine and human, in one person. Therefore, although “the word of God is by nature immortal and incorruptible,” argued Cyril, “since, however, his own body did, as Paul says, by the grace of God taste death for everyone, he himself is said to have suffered death for us.” In other words, because it was truly His body that suffered and died, we can say that “God died” even though God, by His divine nature, cannot die.
Around the same time, the chief pastor of one of the other two cities with a claim to theological preeminence, Rome, made a very similar point. Jesus was fully human and fully divine “without detriment … to the properties of either nature.”
That is to say: Jesus’ two natures aren’t joined together or mixed up with one another. Instead, they both belong to the same person, and it is that person who died and rose again for us. It is God who dies, but He dies as a man.
None of this was ivory tower theologizing. The men who wrote these words were in charge of pastoral care of Christians in their own towns, and also for teaching the faith in the wider world. Their concern was to help God’s people “to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings.” A significant reason for their desire that people should know who died, was their conviction about why He died. Simply put: Jesus’ death on the cross brings us salvation only because He is both fully God and fully man.
The reason behind all this takes us, once again, back to the garden of Eden. If it seems as if we have been back there a lot in this sermon series, it’s only because we have been back there a lot. You see, the problem of sin presents an apparent dilemma for God. The warning not to eat the forbidden fruit in Genesis 2:10 contains a promise: “when you eat from it you will certainly die.” Understanding, as the Bible does, that Adams decision was for all humankind, when the man and woman eat the fruit, it looks as though God we’ll lose either way. Either He must break His word and offer no punishment for mankind’s disobedience, which would be a denial of His very nature, or He must keep His promise, which will mean the destruction of all humanity made in His image.
The incarnation of the son of God as a man his God’s elegant and beautiful solution to the problem of sin. Jesus couldn’t bear the consequences of our sin in death unless he was one of us; He couldn’t overcome death for us unless He was God. Wonderfully for us, He was both. So, what Jesus achieved by His death was nothing less then the destruction of death itself. As church father Athanasius wrote, “they offering to death the body he himself took as an offering and sacrifice free from every stain, he obliterated death from all his peers by the offering of the equivalent … For the human race would have utterly perished, had not the master and savior of all, the Son of God, among us to put an end to death.”
God’s word concerning death had to be fulfilled. Jesus died the death that was demanded in the place of his people. In so doing he was able to restore us to everlasting life – the very thing we were made for. And, in achieving all of this, the God who cannot be lonely died alone. His friends and followers deserted Him, and in the agonies of His death He even cried out in abandonment, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”
The Son of God, who by nature can neither suffer or die, became a man, and died; suffering and alone, so that His people would never have to face the true horror of the certain and final death that is our due. This is the extent of His love. For that death brought us eternity with a God who cannot die. God, who exists outside of time and space, has no end and no beginning. For that reason, no matter how long you live, you will never reach the end of Him. The God of infinite beauty and goodness and wisdom will always have something more of Himself to give to you. However long you’ve been a Christian, you worship a God of whom there is always more to discover and more to enjoy.
And this will be true of our lives beyond death, too. We tend to think of the blessings of the new creation solely in terms of enjoying a world that’s like this one but much better. When we think like that, eternity feels like an awfully long time, because the creation is infinite, and our interest in and enjoyment of it will inevitably wear out. Instead, we need to shift our gaze to the Creator to whom the beauty and wonder of the world points. The highest blessing of eternal life is to know this God, who is eternal and is the giver of life. Trusting in Him, you need never fear that the life to come will dissolve into a long dark teatime of the soul. Why? Because you will never get to the end of God’s goodness – since you are finite, you can never reach the end of the infinite, no matter how long you’ve got. An infinite God is eternally captivating. Knowing this, it is possible to imagine a never-ending life that is more wonderful than you ever thought possible.
