Paying Attention

“‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”  Matthew 22:32  NASB

The living – “Scarcely anywhere else on earth has the mystery of death so moved and fascinated people as in the valley of the Nile.  The entire mentality of ancient Egyptians focused on the depth of this enigma.  The shattering passion of Osiris, who perished every year with the drought of the fields and the death of the plants, seized hold of Egyptian minds like no other myth.”[1]

Are you Egyptian?  Is your attention riveted on death?  Ah, you say, “Of course not.  Why, I hardly even think about it.”  But look at your culture.  To be old is to be useless.  To be sick is to be put aside.  Death is covered up with expensive caskets and flowers.  Funerals are considered tragedies.  Yet everywhere the media, movies and novels portray killing, dying, heroism in Purple Hearts.  Perhaps you are one step away from Egypt.  Perhaps you are Greek where the legacy of a man is determined by how he dies, not how he lives. 

We are mortally schizophrenic.  On the one hand we pretend that death will never darken our doors.  We seek youth.  We eschew any signs of the inevitable.  We flee the Reaper.  On the other hand, we just can’t help looking at an accident.  We attend races where someone might die.  We push the envelope of mortality to see how close we can come to extension.  We love death.  We hate death.  But what we don’t do is look beyond death.

Even our theology is consumed with death.  “It is clear that all decay, all destruction, and all defects are actually the consequence of matter.  Every living creature dies or grows ill only because of its matter and not because of its form.  And all the delinquency and sinning of a man are caused only by his matter and not by his form. . .”[2]

In other words, death is a function of existing as a material being.  And since the mystery of life is death, if we can just get rid of our corrupt physical matter, death will no longer be our preoccupation.  At least that’s the way Plato thought, and Aristotle, and Augustine, and Luther and right on down the theologian’s hall of fame.

But it’s not how Moses thought or what Yeshua said.  God is the God of the living, not the dead.  Just in case you imagined that this comment applies only to human beings, need I remind you that the entire universe is dying?  The Second Law of Thermodynamics is taking its toll.  But God is the God of the living.  Did you really think that God isn’t going to do something about everything that is dying?  Do you realize that the cross is the end of all death, even the death of the stars?  “The God of the living” (theos zonton) has pressed the restart button and nothing is the same.  You and I are called to bring life to the dying universe just as God is bringing life to the dying creation.  There is no sting in the grave, no sorrow at the tomb, no remorse at the wake.  Our God is the God of life!

Perhaps you haven’t quite understood just what all of this really means.  Perhaps you have absorbed the culture of Egypt and Greece and you think being mortal is a detriment.  Perhaps you are still hanging on to youthful naivety or transfixed by symptoms of the end.  Perhaps you haven’t fully transitioned from death to life.  But God has.

Topical Index:  death, life, Matthew 22:32, zoe