Freedom from the fear of death
If you have access to the online Telegraph then I would recommend Rev Marcus Walker's column for Ash Wednesday on the virtue of the Christian understanding of life and death. He makes really good and timely points.
"Do not fear
those who kill the body
but cannot kill the soul;
rather fear him who can destroy
both soul and body in hell." (Matthew 10.28)
Maybe some will recoil at this and think this rather morbid. Do modern Christians still "do" hell and damnation? Here the word for 'hell' - γεέννῃ geenne - is not 'hades' the underworld of Dante fame but the rubbish dump outside Jerusalem. It's quite a vivid picture. Fear not death or persecution, but fear the author of life who can have you tossed in the rubbish dump of reality.
Modern people do not like to think of personal judgement perhaps not only because it seems cruel of the Creator to consigne us to eternal pain but also because as consumers we have grown up being told that 'the customer is always right.' We don't like to be in the wrong! We would prefer to be free to do what we choose.
To give this text a bit more punch for modern ears let's reinterpret it through a Jordan Peterson "filter". Peterson, the Canadian psychologists, author of the various bestsellers, and YouTube sensation believes we underplay our inner monsters and the arduous task of being moral. In my view this is true also for the spiritual quest. Within many Christian circles the inner journey has been Disneyfied. Contemporary spirituality is sugar coated. It presumes our task is simply to stroll back into Eden as if nothing has happened.
So how might Peterson interpret Matthew 10.28 ? I imagine him strutting around saying the following. (Apologies to die-hard Peterson fans.)
"What's worse than death? I mean we are all going to DIE - that's a statistical certainty. But, imagine coming to the end of your years having never loved or been loved. Perhaps you were too shy to make any relationships? Worse still, picture yourself at your deathbed not even caring that you were an awful bastard who treated your fellow man appallingly. If you weren't a psychopath maybe then an idiot who followed the crowd at every instance and never plucked up the courage to stand up for something. And you die, clueless that there was a another way to live. That kind of person existed but never lived. Unless you are a hard core nihilist atheist you gotta admit that life is so much more than survival, dog eat dog, and so on. To have lived your whole bloody life without understanding the point of life is a truly terrible thing. It is throw your very soul on the rubbish dump. Of course, as I'm standing here rambling on with this I bet at the back of your head you are thinking, "Well, thank God that's not me." Are you sure? You'd better be sure Sonny because that's a existential judgement that opens up a damn scary prospect. "
So here is my worry. Since the first global lockdowns liberal democracies have pushed heavy on the fear of death, it has become the all consuming lens by which all our actions are to be judged. Have you noticed that 'Be safe," has morphed into a greeting in itself. Before Covid death lay in the background of our group consciousness. Death was the ultimate consumer inconvenience. Few thought about it. The 'big story' by which we were all measured pre-2020 was being a successful player in this world - someone who acquired a succession of great prizes. Around this the cult of celebrity fitted nicely. These were our gods.
Have societies like ours flipped to the other extreme? The overarching narrative of modern life in 2021 is about survival, keeping safe, not dying. The furniture of our culture has been moved around to fit into this. I have this hunch that society will not flip back to the old mode but sadly stick to this for a long while. I may be wrong but my suspicion is that this new cultural morbidity can not be simply be shuffled away as if it never happened. It will colour how we do things for decades. Risk is to be eliminated at all costs and big institutions and governments are only too willing to facilitate. This could be our new normal.
The swinging from ambivalence to morbidity is surely a result of our cultural divorce from Christianity? In Matthew 10.28 Jesus invites us to look beyond death and to anchor our existence on a wider purpose. This is what we have detached ourselves from. And although Jesus' words seem harsh to modern ears they are inviting us to find balance. There might be all sorts of things we cannot control but we can manage and cultivate our hearts, our spiritual senses and our moral direction. We should design society with those dispositions in mind and not all consuming fear of death.
Is not the alternative before us a healthcare soft-totalitarianism - a Brave New World where life and living are understood as the disproportionate removal of even a microcosm of risk? What would living be like in such a place?
If we go down that route who is to say that our culture will not return to the desperate old pagan ways of sacrificing to the gods to keep the show going? All we would have done is swapped stone altars and wooden statues for more sophisticated ones. Sadly, what would unite us with the antiquity would be a terror of death and a mentality which justified anything to keep that terror at bay.
For Christians the world has to be seen through the prism of the resurrection. If Christ is risen then hope abounds and life is worth living for.
Where, O death, is your sting?’
The sting of death is sin,
and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God,
who gives us the victory
through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15.55-57)
If Christ has paid the cosmic price on the Cross then everything that previously ruled and dominated us is turned upside down, even the fear of death.
"Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood,
He himself likewise shared the same things,
so that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death,
that is, the devil,
and free those who all their lives
were held in slavery by the fear of death." (Hebrews 2:14-15)
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