ETERNAL TRUTH

Life and Death

Some time ago a programme on the radio caught my attention. A young woman was discussing a diet that eliminates all animal products and their derivatives, in order to avoid animal cruelty. What stirred my interest was her passion for the phrase that she repeatedly sneaked into her argument. She said, "In this day and age, with all our technology and experience with life, it is preposterous to embrace the concept that something must die so that I might live!""Something must die that I might live." It is an impenetrable notion—disparaging and hopeful at once, and perhaps as this young woman points out, altogether problematic for the human mind. Soren Kierkegaard applied this difficult idea to Christianity. He reasoned that Christ was the Son of God specifically because He stayed up on the cross and tasted death. "But Humanity cannot grasp the divine mind," he explains. "It would rather conclude that He was the Son of God, if only He had come down from the cross." Indeed, our minds struggle with the need and purpose of Christ's death—Christ himself cried, "Father, is there any other way?" Yet then He added, "Not my will but Yours." Perhaps the truer struggle here originates less in the why's and how's of the mind, but more in the will of the heart that does the asking. In his book The Kingdom of God in America, H. Richard Niebuhr said, "We want a God without wrath who took man without sin into a kingdom without justice through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." This is worth thinking about. With our earthly clay do we mold into our minds a God little more than man-like dictator, concerned more with good duty than with Goodness; timely tribute than Eternal truth? And wouldn't it be easy to offer this God a place in a sin-stained soul that claims it doesn't really need Him? Yet how can we believe in a God any greater than can stand up in the small boxes we've drawn around Him? The God whose footsteps and fingerprints trail through your life is by no means a faceless, Christless God, but The God willing to suffer the darkness of death so that you and I might experience Life. That Christ's death has given us the possibility of life is the essence of Christianity. His words pursue human hearts into the depths of eternity: "I came that you might have Life and have it abundantly." Can you accept this?

Jill Carattini