The Divine Universe

It is Good Friday and I am reflecting on the death of Jesus. Jesus died through an act of extreme brutality and cruelty, and one is horrified to realize that it was a routine procedure throughout the Roman Empire. It happened to thousands of people. Jesus was just one of a batch of three done together. But I may miss the point of today if I focus too much on the horror of crucifixion. This obsession reached a climax in Mel Gibson’s almost pornographically sadistic horror movie, The Passion of Christ.

The gospels actually say nothing about the gory details, they simply state that Jesus was scourged and crucified. They do tell quite a bit about the political and religious pressures and machinations that led to his unjust execution, and they offer many insights into flawed religion and politics. But these are not the main message of the passion stories either.

The essential message of today is that Jesus died. John’s gospel in particular convinces me that Jesus had a unique relationship with God, yet he also says quite unequivocally that Jesus died, and that a spear was thrust through his heart, just to make sure. The great theologians of Nicea, three centuries later, decided by a substantial majority that Jesus was God. I might therefore have difficulty in believing he really died. Maybe the whole thing was just pretending. In fact the final word is that Christ is immortal. He is immortal, but he is also mortal, as mortal as we are. If political and religious conditions had been different, if people had been less ruthless in pursuit of their own narrow-minded logic, Jesus might have died in old age; but he would still have died.

If Jesus was God, then that means that even God suffers and dies. Suffering, death and resurrection are innate and continuous features of God’s incarnate being. The famous 17th century scientist and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, said that Christ suffers till the end of time. In Christ, I too am both mortal and immortal. (It is evidently possible to be both.) And Good Friday, by focusing on Jesus’ suffering and death, invites me to reflect upon my own vulnerability and mortality.

This is a perfectly healthy thing to do. People tend to be in denial about death. Even at funerals these days the “d” word is almost taboo. We are urged to celebrate the life of the departed one. Mourning his or her passing is permitted but not encouraged.

Unfashionable as it may be, I am moved to reflect on the place of death in my life, on what it means to be mortal, like Jesus. It means that I am embodied in a biological organism that has a finite life expectancy. And I am also part of a larger organism - Earth’s biosphere. Every plant and animal on Earth is organically interrelated. And everything lives, dies and is recycled into new living organisms. Birth, death and new birth constitute a continual process which my own body is part of.

As I meditate, my thoughts travel beyond Earth, to non-biological, astronomical objects and I find they too follow the same cyclic process. Galaxies, stars and planets form, exist for a few billion years and eventually disintegrate in various ways. The material is later recycled into new planets, stars and galaxies. Death and resurrection are cosmic phenomena.

But there is a difference between me and our galaxy or the Sun or planet Earth, or even the plants and other animals. I know I’m going to die; they don’t. I can even feel the process going on. I notice physical changes that tell me my body is approaching its use-by date. Some of my childhood friends are already compost or ashes.

I have mixed feelings about that. I am tempted to be anxious about what will happen to me after I die. Some people solve the problem by choosing to believe there is nothing; others create attractive fantasies. Some have claimed to have been there. I am more in sympathy with Hamlet, with his uncertainty about what might follow after he “shuffled off this mortal coil”.

Jesus and the New Testament writers urge me to be hopeful, and I freely choose that option. I do not expect that my faults and imperfections will be ignored or eliminated by magic. But I do believe that God is infinitely patient with me, and I must be patient with God. God’s uncompromising and persistent demand for perfection is sometimes hard to accept, but I know that, ultimately, God is not making deals.

So I trust and hope. I see wonderful signs in the world and in the universe around me. The new burst of life in spring, the cosmic evolution from chaos to order, from inert to living matter, towards higher and higher states of complexity and consciousness: all these miracles reinforce my optimism.

Looked at in the timescale of my own mortal lifespan, progress is desperately slow because evolutionary change takes millions or billions of years rather than centuries. In the immediate present and historic past everything seems frighteningly chaotic, and change to be imperceptible. But human history is only a tick of the cosmic clock.

With such hope I can, like Francis, begin to say, “Welcome Sister Death!” Of course, Francs really had had enough of his body. It was unbearably weak and painful. I am not in that state. I look forward to some more active and creative years. But death does not frighten me. It is not a taboo subject.

Some religious zealots thunder out scary fantasies, but they do not, I think, come from God. God hasn’t created hell; we have. And we live now in a purgatory of our own making. Anyway, there are better reasons for living responsibly and lovingly than fear of hell. A moral life, a loving life, is much happier than an immoral and selfish one – that is God’s message, and experience confirms it. Heaven is about living in love.

So I reflect on the death of Jesus - a horrifying event but, in view of what we humans are like, fairly inevitable. (We tend to hate prophetically good people.) As I reflect I can relate Jesus’ mortality to my own and to my certain death. The death and resurrection of Jesus is an invitation to share his perfect mortality by letting the Holy Spirit teach me godly and holy living. I am also invited to share his immortality, and I say yes, even though I don’t really know what it means.