Poolesville Presbyterian Church
04.17.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: John 10: 22-30
Death is a funny thing. Meaning, not funny in a “ha ha” sort of way, no matter how well Deadpool has been doing at the box office. Funny peculiar.
We don’t really talk about it, not much, in our day to day existence, because we’d just rather not. It feels like a grim distraction, this reality that all of us face. It’s such an integral part of life, that we age and grow old and eventually stop functioning, and yet it’s just not a regular topic of conversation unless you work in hospice-car, as a funeral home director, or as the lead singer for some Scandinavian death metal band.
The process of aging and dying is something that has fascinated science lately, as we human beings fish around for keys to maybe putting that whole dying thing off for, I don’t know, a century or two. Or longer, as non-existence is something we’d rather avoid.
There were studies, back in the 20th century, that suggested that the way to live longer was to radically restrict the calories you consumed. If you ate a very very small amount of healthy food, research suggested, you could bump up your lifespan by several decades. “Calorie-restriction,” it was called, and there are communities of individuals on the web who are obsessively devoted to that practice. It always struck me as a poor tradeoff...hey! Instead of dying at 85, you can spend another thirty years being hungry the whole time! Yay!
There are studies now into the process of senescence, meaning how living beings degrade as they age. Not all do, it’s been found. There are species of ants that just keep trucking along, utterly unaffected by age right up until the moment that they just mysteriously switch off. There are living beings, like the bristlecone pine, that don’t seem to age at all. The bristlecone has the distinction of being the living thing with the longest lifespan, with the oldest living specimens being over five thousand years old. What’s striking about the older bristlecones is that they’re considerably healthier and more vibrant than younger trees. The little thousand-year old adolescents aren’t as productive as the four to five thousand year old trees. It’s not that they can’t die, of course. You can burn them, or cut them down and make them into really-really-low-karma IKEA furniture. But as best we can tell, bristlecones don’t die otherwise.
So science struggles and wrestles with our mortality, again, with some hope of unlocking why it is that we don’t just keep on truckin’.
I do wonder, though, if that would be a good thing. Would a life that just went on and on and on be a blessing? I mean, I look back at my high school yearbook, and I find myself marvelling at just how few of those souls I still remember. Those I’m still friends with, I remember. But I know among those other faces, there are people that I may have been in class with, who were part of the ambient reality of my adolescence, that I really no longer remember.
If we lived for five hundred years? A thousand? It’d feel too much. Old friends, forgotten. Memories would pile upon memories, until we could no longer hold on to all of them, the two point five petabytes our organic neural network can hold finally filled to saturation.
I think, honestly, we’d feel a little like Bilbo Baggins after celebrating his hundred and elevenses, spread thin, like butter spread over too much bread.
And yet here, here in the Gospel of John, we have Jesus talking about eternal life.
In the midst of a festival, Jesus is wandering the around the temple in Jerusalem. It’s a festival that in Jesus’ time was known as the Feast of Dedication, when Jews were meant to come and celebrate the temple’s liberation from the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes nearly two hundred years before. We know it by another name: Hannukah.
There are no dreidels or candles, at least not that make their way into the story as told, but it’s Hannukah nonetheless. It’s an interesting marker, because this Gospel tells us that Jesus may have been hanging around Jerusalem for three months, since he wandered down from Galilee back in chapter seven to be part of the Sukkot fall festival.
Jesus finds himself in an exchange with a group of Judeans. It’s a testy exchange, as those who gather around Jesus feel like he’s not being direct with them, that he’s leading them on with his peculiar, obscure way of talking.
Stop wasting our lives, they’re saying, which this gospel conveys in the Greek through an idiom of annoyed impatience. “We follow, and we listen, and you’re taking up our time, Jesus, and still you just won’t just come out and tell us what we expect to hear.”
And he responds, as he tends to, with more challenges in response.
He makes the case that they should already know, because he’s already been among them and both teaching and acting for a while. And when he says some strange, strange things. He says that he and his Father are one, which really really cheesed people off. But he also says, straight up, that those who grasp what he teaches are given something unusual. What the Aramaic words were, we cannot be sure, but the Gospel of John describes it in the Greek as zoe aionion, literally, the life of all ages. The Eternal Life.
This concept isn’t unique to the Gospel as told by John. It’s in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in exactly the same form. It’s in Paul’s writings, and in other of the Epistles.
In addition to the overwhelming span of eternity set before us, there’s also something of a theological conundrum that I’ve always struggled with when presented with this concept. If there lies an eternity beyond this one, a span of being that stretches forever, in which we are always ourselves just as we are now, why do the choices we make in this life matter?
If we continue as moral agents, forever and ever, just as we are now, what makes the choices of today and tomorrow relevant against the endlessness of eternity? My life, all our lives, feel like a fleeting instant, an infinitesimal nothing against the yawning deep of all time. Do you remember the time period between 7:27 am and 7:28 am on October 3rd of 2014? That single minute is a vastly larger fraction of your life than living a hundred and thirteen years would be relative to the eternal life. Is that the measure of you as a human being?
And yet Jesus and the great story of redemption and repentance place an emphasis on this life, this time, the choices we make in the flesh and in the now.
For those of us who call ourselves his, this life is the place where that decision must be made, where transformation must occur. It is the seedbed of our reality, the foundation on which our relationship with our creator rests.
How, then, to interpret this assertion that being a disciple of Jesus offers us a life eternal?
Speaking to it exactly, in its fullness? I don’t think any of us can do that. I don’t think human language itself is capable of bearing the weight of that reality. It’s why Jesus talked in strange, indirect ways about it, using story and parable and peculiar, abstract symbols.
But we do know some things.
It is not simply about avoiding senescence, not about with aging or the way we change and grow over the course of our days. Neither can it be interpreted as only being something we participate in at some point following this existence, in an endless life that is just precisely the same as the one we inhabit now, only infinitely longer.
The reality of the zoe aionion is that it is the life of all our ages, the life of our every moment. It was yesterday, it is today, and it will be our tomorrow, whatever that may bring. Our days, these days, are set into the reality of God’s work, as bright and precious and eternal as the heavens themselves. Jesus, who was one with God, knew this, and his whole life was in the service of that reality.
In this time, Jesus calls us to be his flock, to act and live as if we have heard his message of grace and mercy, that we have listened and understood.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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