Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent

Lectionary: 254

Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever keeps my word will never see death."

So the Jews said to him, "Now we are sure that you are possessed."

"Everything, insofar as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being." So said the great philosopher Spinoza, as quoted by Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish philosopher. He added to Spinoza's insight,

"The endeavor whereby each individual thing endeavors to persist involves no finite time but indefinite time. That is to say that you, I, and Spinoza wish never to die and that this longing of ours never to die is our actual essence."

Should I lose my longing never to die I will cease to exist.

I see that longing daily in the VA hospital. Sometimes my utilitarian mind wonders why does this fellow want to keep going. He has so many comorbidities! He'll surely never see another Christmas. And then he turns up again on my new admissions list, five years later. What kept him going? I wonder.

But we're all familiar with that craving for life. Should we come across a dying animal in our daily walk -- a fallen bird or a wounded mouse -- it will strive mightily to escape our hands. Even if we would "put it out of its misery" it flees from us.

But there is something irrational about that urge. When Jesus promises us, "...whoever keeps my word will never see death." his rational opponents declare him possessed. Oddly, they don't argue with his claim of authority to raise the dead or deliver from death; they argue that Abraham and the prophets are dead!

But if the heroic ancestors are dead, what hope can they have for themselves? How or why do they persist in being if even Moses, the "Intimate Friend of God," is dead? As Michael Martin Murphey sang, "And if love never lasts forever, tell me what's forever for?"

The believer will never be content with a doctrine of eternal, endless death. We know in our sanctified bones that cannot be right.

But it's is a struggle nonetheless. There are innumerable forces around us and within us that whisper "futility!" A child will raise the question when he asks, "Why should I make my bed? I'll just muss it up again tonight!"

More urgently, heroin reminds the user, "You will want this relief every day for the rest of your life. You will never forget this craving." Why should he even try to quit? It's so painful.

Warriors who have killed, or engaged in killing, or sent others to their death have looked through that narrow opening and seen nothing.

But this challenge of futility, as urgent as it seems, is nothing new. The world's most ancient literature, including Gilgamesh, the Book of Job and Spencer's Fairie Queene have worried over it. I especially appreciated Spencer's story of the Red Knight and his encounter with Despair. Thank goodness Red's girlfriend Una rushed into the cadaverous cave to haul him out. Despair had successfully shown him the futility of virtuous living and he was about to stab himself.

Jesus, by his life and death, has validated our actual essence, our longing never to die. We do not want to die and we have no intention of dying. Until it comes we will continue planning to live -- employed or  retired, with assisted living, in the nursing home and in hospice -- if it comes to that. From natural conception to natural death. As the Lord made us.