Lent 5: Mortality and Immortality

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45

It is a sobering thought to realise that as human beings we are defined by the stark fact that we are going to die. We are mortals, and that is what a mortal is, literally: a being who dies. The word finds its origin in the Latin mors, death, and as such we encounter it in terms like mortality and mortal wound. We are mortals and that means that we are going to die, like the palmist wrote: “As for mortals, their days are like the grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more”. (Psalms 103:15-16) At the same time, the book of the Wisdom of the Solomon reminds mortals that our “hope is full of immortality”. (Wisdom of Solomon 3:4b) As real as is our mortality and that of everyone we know or love, so is that hope of immortality held out to us; and yet ironically enough, we will never come to know the second, if we cannot fully accept, embrace, enter into the deepest depths of the first. And there is no short cut, no easy out. We cannot come into the fulness of that hope of immortality, simply by down-playing or ignoring our mortality. Mortality and immortality are both realities, and we live in that tension. Life and the hope of immortality are certainly real, but no less real than death, both its power and the grief and pain caused by it.

The first parish in which I served had five nursing homes within its boundaries, and English clergy have the responsibility and privilege of officiating at all funerals of those who die within the parish. Often my colleague and I would have two or three funerals a week between us. It was during that time when I first came in contact with a particular piece of sentimentalism, a poem entitled Death is Nothing at All: “Death is nothing at all,” it read, “I have only slipped away to the next room….Life is the same that it ever was.” Invariably, families would come to me wanting to use this poem at funerals. I'd never say no, but I would ask them if this is what they seriously meant, that “death is nothing at all”; and, if life really is “the same as it ever was” what were we doing? Why were they grieving? Why we were preparing for a funeral, to mark this “nothing” event? Death is ‘Something”. It is real, and simplistic ideas about the promise of immortality serve no one well. I am pleased to say I never had to hear that poem read at a funeral I officiated.

Death is real, and while that hope of immortality is real too it does not eclipse the pain, shock and sense of loss attendant on death. Last week the themes of light and dark pervaded the readings and the gospel, today it is the themes of death and life, and as they do so we have two pieces of poetry on which to focus; two poems written over 300 years apart and by two very different men. John Donne was born in 1572. Certainly in his early years he enjoyed the “good life” – wine, women, song and all that, and his literary production was composed primarily of satiric and erotic poems. At the same time, he worked as a lawyer and served as member of Parliament. However, in 1615 he was ordained priest at the insistence of King James. He was made Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and became renown as a preacher and spiritual writer. He is most commonly known for the phrase “for whom the bell tolls” derived from his published meditations. He died in 1631. W.H. Auden was born in 1907 in England, but emigrated to the United States in 1939 and because a U.S. citizen in 1946. He was poet, essayist and dramatist the central themes of whose work are “love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature”. Both were committed churchmen; both had conversion experiences as adults. Auden himself had abandoned the Anglicanism of his youth, but returned to it in 1940 when he became an Episcopalian. This morning, are brought together two of their works – Donne’s Holy Sonnet X and Auden’s Funeral Blues. Brought side by side and from across the centuries, and read in conjunction with each other, the two works demand we live in that uncomfortable place where both mortality and immortality are realities. They demand we sit with both the agonising loss which cries that “nothing now can come to any good”, and at the same time with the hope “that death shall be no more;…that Death, thou shalt die”; to sit with them, without minimising the real pain of the first and without despairing of the hope expressed in the second. As we enter completely into and stay with the two seemingly opposing realities the poems represent, we find ourselves standing with Jesus at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. We find ourselves with him as he knows the deep mystery of resurrection, and yet is still moved to tears at the death of his dear friend. For him both realities are real. The knowledge of resurrection does not erase the immediate pain of loss, or the suffering of those who pass through the gates of death and enter into its depths. Standing there among his grieving friends he grieves himself, while he holds out and gives a foretaste of the hope of immortality.

Sometimes people wonder at, and are even offended by, the fact that we Catholic Christians focus so much on Jesus’ suffering on the cross, particularly with images of the crucified Christ. “Christ is risen” they say; and of course we would agree, but it sometimes feels as if some people want to get to Easter without having to engage with the pain, anguish and desolation of real death on the cross. I was recently surprised to learn how many Christian communities here in Hanford will have no Good Friday service, no place to liturgically encounter the darkness when “the stars are not wanted”, the moon packed up, the sun dismantled. The thing is that if we allow ourselves to “skip” or ignore Good Friday – the cross and its attendant death – we also can “skip over” – never enter into the – deep pits of our own pain and loss, of our disappointments and frustrations, and embrace them both as real and as our own. “Christ is risen” does not erase the cross and its horror, neither does the “hope of immortality” erase the painful and grievous consequences of mortality. Rather, the “hope of immortality” is the promise that the pain and the reality of death, while most definitely part of the story, are not the whole story, and it holds out to us a vision of a reality when indeed “death shall be no more”. But we can only get there from here, and that means through the deep pits of death, pain, disappointment. It was so for Christ, why do we think it should be any different for us?

Death is real, very real. If you do not know that, speak to someone who has lost a child or a partner or friend. The hope of immortality is real too, however. Ask anyone who has found new life on the other side of loss and pain, who has experienced that loss and pain as glorified into a new vision and purpose. Like Jesus, we are called to hold those two realities together at the same time, living in creative tension between them. If we cannot we lose something: we focus on a life hereafter, while cutting off something of what it means to human; or we become morosely obsessed, while cutting ourselves off from a hope that is “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading”. (1 Peter 1:4)

The painful consequences of our mortality make us cry with Auden “nothing now can come of any good”, while our “hope of immortality” can say Donne’s words with trust, “those whome thou think’st thou doth overthrow die not poor Death, nor canst thou kill me.” Both are real, both are true. Our work is to wait upon the Lord within the tension of both those realities; to wait like the psalmist says, “more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning”. (Psalm 130:5) It is to wait, while honouring both mortality and immortality as our human inheritance.