From the Daily Lectionary for Monday in the Eleventh Week after Pentecost
John 5:19-29
Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished. Indeed, just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whomsoever he wishes. The Father judges no one but has given all judgement to the Son, so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Anyone who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. Very truly, I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgement, but has passed from death to life.
“Very truly, I tell you, the hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself; and he has given him authority to execute judgement, because he is the Son of Man. Do not be astonished at this; for the hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and will come out—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation.”
In his masterpiece, The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot coined a term that many felt captured the essence of Modernity: “Death in life.” He is describing the unsettled and anxious world between the two World Wars of the twentieth century. The poet/protagonist observes a crowd of Londoners crossing a bridge over the Thames, going about their dreary routine and he muses, quoting from Dante’s Inferno, “I’d not thought death had undone so many.”
Eliot, of course, is not speaking of our natural physical deaths, but of an existence without meaning and purpose, a life of isolation and disconnection…. Death in life. The title of the poem, The Wasteland, becomes a symbol of the collective western soul. The persistent anxiety of the interbellum would prefigure and give way to the intense nihilism of post-modernity.
To be sure, the world within which John’s Gospel was written was vastly different from Eliot’s twentieth century world, but certainly there are things that we have in common with our distant ancestors. John seems to have in mind something similar to Eliot’s observation: that the burden of death is a present reality. John speaks of the dead being raised from their tombs. He is not talking about life after death. He is speaking of a way to live a meaningful and abundant life here and now; a way to live beyond the so-called death in life.
The way of Jesus is of course the means. It is the means of living within God’s very life, which is a life of sacrifice for the greater good. It is in “befriending” our neighbor that gives life and life abundant. John speaks for a community that is living out this reality. “We have seen and we have heard,” John proclaims as to this life of the Spirit, a life energized by self-giving; a life energized by Love, in short. Love will subvert isolation and disconnection; Love will engender perspective as to our anxiety; Love brims with meaning and purpose. But Love is a practice. It is not just a good idea, or a fleeting emotion.
At the heart of John’s theology is that Love is the very presence of God in the world, and we, made in God’s image, share that divine capacity. To Love is to live, because love is stronger than death, even death in life. It is time for us, good people of the way, to Love once again, because death has undone so many, and, for the world’s sake, we need to get busy living.
A Prayer at the Great Vigil of Easter (BCP p.288)
O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
