Reliving The Passion #29

Mark 15:24a

And they crucified him.

If death is the end of all we do, then all we do is futile. Ask Ozymandias, king of kings, if you can find that mighty man—or if you remember him at all.

We may deny death. Indeed, we may be able, for a while, to ignore our personal dyings altogether by attending to the present day: here we are and now we are, no need to think what we will (or will not) be. Or we may romanticize our grander passions into something timeless, pieces of ourselves that must last forever (as poets call their verses deathless, as lovers can’t conceive such love as theirs to die). We may philosophize our immortality by the arrogant, god-like presumption that simply because we are—and because we are aware that we are—we cannot not be.

But if death waits at the ends of our lives to end them, it cancels not just the next day nor just the continuance of living: it swallows the whole life, even back to its beginning. Suddenly we are not, as though we never had been. There are those who console themselves that history, at least, will remember them. (Ozymandias was such a one.) But if death is the end of human endeavor—and so of humanity—then who will remember history?

Oh, people: if death defines us, so that we who came from nothing also go back to nothing, then death is a worm that curls inside our every act, like a parasite eating the lasting value out of it! Even in our dearest kissing is the parasite which shall, on our deathday, prove that this act, too, was futile, and all our loving so much sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The planets, their civilizations and their loads of people, all need a central sun—to hold them together, to keep them wheeling in good order, to bequeath them shape and meaning. History needs a center. But if that center is empty death, strengthless death, it cannot hold. Things fly apart into absurdity. Finally, every deed is hollow, ourselves mere spasms in a mindless infinity, and all our glorious history remembered only so long as it is; forgotten, when it is not, forever: a nothing. A vanity. We are the dreams the comets can’t recall. We were, for a while, a walking dust.

But the Creator God put a cross in the very center of human history—to be its center, ever.

The Son of God, the gift of God, the love of God, the endless light of the self-sufficient God filled the emptiness which was death at our core. People, here is eternal life in the very midst of us!

Now, therefore, it is the person and the passion of Jesus Christ which defines us; and because of him we go no longer down to nothing: our end is the beginning of a perfect union with God, the Beginner Of Everything.

Behold, this is the central event of the whole of history; behold, this is the sun that keeps the planets and bequeaths importance to the peoples and makes significant even me and all I do: And they crucified him. It happened. Eternity entered time. They crossed at the cross.

We are altogether meaningless, except God touch us. God touched us here.

We fly into an infinity of hell, separated from life and from each other and from divinity forever, except God hold us. God holds us here.

My dear ones,

I kiss you—and my kiss is pure and good. It lasts for you forever. Because my love is strong and bright and rich and true and worthy forever.

Because my Savior is.