Christian Perceptions… Death

SAT., FEB. 20, 1999, 7:14 AM
FARM, STUDY

Christians are numerous in the population of this earth… and I’m pleased that this is so. Yet different cultures influence perceptions of this faith, so that Christians can be quite different from one another. Christians can be gentle and peace-loving. Christians can be aggressive and brutal. How can this be?

One explanation could be that there really is a single, true way that all Christians should be, and therefore variations from this are just evidences of being “less than Christian”. Naturally the major “model” would be My life as Jesus, here in the earth, as recorded in the Gospels and as interpreted by My servant, Paul. But there is one major contrast in that story. With some amount of violence I drove money-changers out of the Temple, because they were “commercializing” My house of worship. In this instance (once… or was it twice?) I stood up for the “right” in a somewhat violent, physical way.

Yet at the end of My short life story I did not defend Myself and acceded to crucifixion, gentle as a lamb. I accepted a painful, ignominious death as a sacrifice. Death came, and I accepted it, like unto a martyr.

How does this “translate” into a lesson for you Christians, particularly American Christians, here at the end of the 20th century, nearly 2,000 years after My time in the earth? You are part of the most powerful nation on earth, with weapons that can kill, maim, and destroy beyond what was imaginable in Biblical times. Will today be a day when some of such weapons are “unleashed” – to uphold “the right’, but also to cause deaths and destruction?

Now a fundamental of the Christian faith is that life, in the spirit, continues after death of the body. As Jesus I died on the cross, and My body was put in a tomb, with a huge stone rolled across the entrance. The current church season of Lent shall end with Good Friday and the crucifixion and burial AND then with Easter morning and resurrection. I was dead, but I arose from the grave, and was back in My body again, even with the wounds that hastened My death.

Most of you don’t expect and won’t experience such a complete continuation of life, but, symbolically, the spirit survives bodily death and life continues. This, of course, could justify killing humans, for righteous reasons… “the body they may kill”, but the spirit lives on. The account of My return from death, as Jesus, told of My being “freed” from the restraints of the body. I could go through closed doors, appear and disappear… that I couldn’t do before, as a normal living human.

Thus, it is hard to deny, though many modern Christians try to, that giving up one’s life can be a sacrifice with much spiritual power. It COULD be seen as Christian that any of the “natural” causes of death – heart disease, cancer, pneumonia – should just be accepted… not treated so that there would be recovery and more earth life. The hospice movement embodies this when it is fairly clear that death is imminent, but there is still much in the way of medical procedures to maintain bodily life, even when a person can no longer be functional.