Fifth Sunday of Lent

Image: "Breath Will Come to the Desolate Bones"
© Jan Richardson

Click here for scripture readings

Jesus said: "Lazarus is dead. "

But what exactly is death?

It depends on whom you ask.

To the ordinary person, death is when you stop breathing.

To a doctor, it is when brain waves stop.

Those are reasonable ways of deciding the point of death.

But there is more to us than a physical body.

From the Christian perspective, what happens to us at death is far less important than what we do at death.

For Christians, death is that point when we sum up our whole life, when a whole lifetime of actions has determined who we are,

when a succession of decisions has defined our personality,

when we decide what we want to be for eternity.

Death is the instant when we finally acknowledge precisely who we are and then present that finished self as an offering to the mercy of God.

Even if the body is suddenly killed, personal death is a process.

Even if bodily cessation is accidental, death is purposeful.

That is why the instant of physical death may not be the same instant of personal decision.

It might be that pain or anxiety or drugs or fear may prevent a person from the ultimate personal decision at the point of physical death.

But at some point in life, every person does—or does not — make that ultimate offering of self to God.

Even if they do not know when, even if they do not believe in God. each person at some time decides whether their whole life is sell serving or self-giving,

whether their life dissolves in futility or falls into the mystery of God.

Karl Rahner wrote: "There are so many little deaths along the way that it doesn't matter which is the last one."

Each failure, each suffering, each illness is a lessening of our life, a diminishment of our self.

But we are not created for our own self only.

We are created to live with God forever.

We are given this earthly life to allow us to become that person we want to be forever.

We are given a certain amount of time to create, by every free choice, that unique person who will have a

unique personal relationship with their God.

That relationship with God. as with all other relationships, is based on love.

And love is the desire for union with another.

Which demands that we get out of ourselves and into the other.

Love means that we prefer the good of the other to our own good.

Love means that we defer to the other's wishes, that our wishes coincide.

All of which means that, like the Baptist, we decrease so they increase.

That is how by each act of love we gradually let go of our control of life, that we gradually give in to God.

So that when death finally comes, giving up the rest of our self will not be hard.

Death will he a joyful letting go instead of a grudging holding on to life.

People have difficulty with death because they consider it to be the end of life.

Christians know that death is a transitional stage to a different kind of life.

People have trouble with death because they think it is the destruction of all they worked so hard to accomplish.

Christians know that death is the summation, the culmination of life.

Or, as Jesus called it. his hour of triumph.

If we really believed these things, then death would lose its frightful grip on us

.