The Goal Of Human Life Is Not Death, But Resurrection

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

TS Eliot, East Coker, The Four Quartets

Though I didn’t attend a Church service yesterday, but I have always found the Good Friday mass moving. In our culture we attempt to distance itself from death, to put off its process in aging with creams and surgery, to never talk about it openly. We/I blink off the TV the endless reports of hunger, suffering and death. Yet, avoid it as we might it breaks through, an inconvenient reminder. When you say to someone “you are going to die one day”, they often say “I don’t like to think about it” and rightly because to dwell on death completely is a denial of life. We live in a world seemingly directed to death. A world compromised with death and the machinery of death – the cogs of an utterly ruthless and utilitarian capitalism, utterly unconcerned with life as such, but only in reducing reality and human interrelatedness to the basest of notions, the creation of properties, the quantification of time and space as money, the exercise of power as a result of their obtainment. Humans are reduced to processing machines calculating only their self interest – life studied by the most cynical sciences. Matter is dead to their understandings, humanity is dead. This is a world where drug companies, concerned to protect their intellectual property, make the calculation not to allow non-patented drugs to those who most need it. A world where environmental concerns, the destruction of countless species of animals and plants, only become concerns at all when it becomes profitable to meet them. In Christ’s death we see the suffering of humanity and its death, the suffering of the world reflected in the suffering of God. Good Friday should be seen as a day to remember, ponder, consider the world of suffering. Consider the suffering of our own lives, but more importantly, as it is our moral priority, the suffering in the lives of others. This is often how the bidding prayers are designed in Churches. Through remembrance of Christ we remember suffering. Christ’s death is one of fleshly, brutal and ugly materiality that reflects our own world – dying as a political radical by the powers of the state, as a heretic by the powers of religion, sold to his death by someone he considered to be his friend. as a son, as a friend, as a leader. As the prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. As humanity itself. As the ravaged world itself.

But we should, on this Holy Saturday – the day of grief and desolation – remember what we are waiting for – Easter Sunday. We are waiting for a change in the logic of death, a change to the logic of resurrection. As St Paul’s understood, Christ’s death and resurrection makes the whole of reality anew and ushers in the kingdom of God. But this is change is something that we can all participate in, something we are all called to. As every good catholic school child knows, Christ has no hands but hours. To think on this is to attempt the resurrection of reality through the actions of Christ’s body on earth – the Church, however understood. To attempt this is to attempt to refound the world on the principle of resurrection, of new life, of love in new life, instead of the principles of death. The love of a person resurrected, sharing a simple meal among friends. Is this an idealistic notion. Or perhaps it is, for in our world any attempt to defy the current order is instantly dismissed as idealistic. But it is something to be hoped for, waited for desires – that in understanding the resurrection and life after death Christianity might understanding it as much more than simply the possibility of personal immortality, but the principle that we might become politically and socially engaged with the world. It is a time to renew the whole of reality, the political order, like the coming of spring.The principle that we re-found a community based on the actions of love in life, rather than one based on the brute calculations of death. As John Milbank says “Resurrection is no proof of divinity, nor a kind of vindication of Jesus’ mission.(this comment alone is worth a world of reflection)….What we have is the memory of community, of “ordinary” conversation, of eating and drinking, continuing beyond death….To remember the resurrection, to hope for the universal resurrection, is a “political act”: for it is the ultimate refusal of all denials of community. The return of all the dead in reconciliation; the innocent, the guilty, the oppressed and the oppressors, is looked for.”

Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters