by Joseph Stoutzenberger
When I was a child, I loved movies. As a paperboy, if I paid my bill in full by 10:00 Saturday morning I received a pass to our local movie theater. (My small home town had only one theater.) I attended many Saturday matinees. I took it to heart when a character I liked died in a movie. When that happened, I developed a habit of running out of the theater, going to a nearby park, climbing a tree, and imagining that I had a special potion that would bring that character back to life. Something in us humans abhors suffering and death, and longs for a life that is greater than the apparent finality of death. We want our loved ones to be with us for eternity.
The Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse-Five is worth reading if for no other reason than for one little vignette. Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in the novel, has the ability to travel in time. One evening, he is watching a World War II movie and, since he can, decides to watch it backwards. He sees exploded bombs returning unexploded back into airplanes and shipped back to factories where mostly women workers are dismantling them and returning their ingredients to the earth from which they came. Would that our world was like that! Like myself as a child, Billy Pilgrim wants to reverse the ravages of death; and in his reveries he is able to do so. Do we have only two possible viewpoints regarding death and its aftermath—either despair or childish wishful thinking? Might there instead be grounds for hope?
What does Christianity have to say about death and the possibility of afterlife? It doesn’t provide an explanation; but it does offer some consolation by highlighting that Jesus, one of us who is also divine, endured death—not just death, but excruciating torture and the worst form of execution the Romans of his time could think of. It goes on to say that, based on the word of a number of his closest friends and followers, this human-divine Jesus was raised from the dead. For Christians, because of Jesus, people can hold onto the hope that death is not the end.
Is there anything in the life and teaching of Jesus, even apart from his appearances after his death, that would support belief in the resurrection of the dead? A key message proclaimed by Jesus is that God is love. That message came through not just in his words but in his actions and life story. Ironically, Christians find the message of love expressed most definitively in Jesus’s death on the cross, as if his out-stretched arms are an embrace from a loving God.
Some years ago, two Christian pastors wrote a book with an intriguing title: If God Is Love. That sentence can be completed in any number of ways, all of them hopeful and consoling. One way that came to me is: If God is love, then life beyond death makes perfect sense. To believe in God is to believe that God is love. That love does not cease when someone dies. Does it make any sense that God would be vengeful or even indifferent rather than loving? (“I created this mess just to see people suffer.” Or “I created this mess, but I don’t care what happens to it.”) Theologian Leonardo Boff expresses beautifully that to believe in God is to believe that God is love: “To say ‘I believe in God’ means that there is Someone who surrounds me, embraces me everywhere, and loves me. Someone who knows me better than I do myself, deep down in my heart….Believing in God means saying: there exists an ultimate tenderness in which I can take refuge and finally have peace.”
In other words, God shares the deepest longings of the human heart. Resurrection means that the lives of loved ones who die remain part of a mosaic of incomprehensible beauty. Love would settle for nothing less. Yes, people die; but they die into the loving embrace of that Someone whose name is love.
Joseph Stoutzenberger 