11 August 2006

The week ends with Douglas John Halls last words on Death's Orientation Toward Life in "The Cross in Our Context."

As the negative biblical thought is always present for the purpose of serving the positive (think of the role of Satan in Job), so death is there in order to enhance life and the beauty and joy of life, and in some sense death has to be gone through before life can be experienced in something approximating its fullness. Just as light presupposes the experience of darkness, and love of lovelessness and aloneness, and hope of despair, and faith of doubt, and so on, so life becomes the miracle it is only as we confront its antithesis. But the end, always, the bleakness of the means notwithstanding, is the positive pole in this dynamic - the yes, not the no. Therefore a pietism of the cross that ends by basking in unrelieved, morbidly enticing sorrow must certainly be seen as a contradiction and misrepresentation of the theology of the cross.

"Life become the miracle it is only as we confront its antithesis." Death is not that in which we glory. Rather, we glory - we live within the great gift of God's glory - as we live in the face of death and everything that comes through the brutality and finality of death as seen in the cross. Therefore, we take up our lives even as death attempts to play with our lives. We are invited to not play with death - but to live. How often have you heard people refer to the cross they must pick up as one that is coated in this sorrow? It is as though that is the way of life that one takes when a person follows Jesus. I find that Hall does a good job and making sure we deal with death and all its power and all of its ways of enticing us into its games, and yet, we go beyond death to "the yes" beyond death's grasp. It is life that is full because it lives in the face of death no matter what death attempts to do with us. We are always invited into the life that comes out the otherside of whatever might be the game death plays today...the side of new life.

Connection: It is not easy to see what the "yes" might be in the middle of the power of death when it is flexing the power that we have given it in our lives. What is the "yes" you see today? What is the new that was hidden in all the things that attempt to negate life?

You, O God, are always present to bring life. We give you thanks for another day in which we can rest in your promise of new life in the face of all that we will encounter. You lead us through that valley of death - you give us space in which we can live - you provide for us even as we fall short and cannot see around the next corner of this day. Thanks be to you, O Lord. Amen.