Sermons from St Faith's
Raised to Life
Fr Dennis Smith, July 1st, 2012
“Why are the heroes of your novels always so full of
anguish?” a journalist once asked Francoise Sagan. “Because”, the
novelist replied, “they live with the thought of death.” And Andre
Malraux once remarked that “Man is the only animal who knows that
he is mortal.” Truly, one is not a man unless he is conscious of
the great mystery of death, and even if he does not succeed ever
in resolving that mystery, unless he comes to terms with it.
The mystery of death envelops not only the phenomenon of death
itself, but also what lies beyond death. Even if we admit the
existence of a hereafter of some kind, there remains the scandal
of our complete ignorance regarding the future life, and the
scandal of our total separation from those who gave died. The fact
seems to be that we are confined within some kind of terrestrial
prison, and that this imprisonment frustrates our noblest
aspirations. At a given moment, we run into a stone wall, and
everything we hold dear, our most vital relations, are reduced to
nothingness in an instant.
We say that love is stronger than death. And yet death inexorably
separates those who love one another and refuses to allow us the
consolation of the slightest sign of life or love from beyond the
grave. We can continue to love one who has died, of course; but we
can’t communicate with him or her in any way. And what is love
without communication, without the hope ever of seeing the one we
love.
How easily we understand the motivations of Orpheus, who risked
his own life to rescue Eurydice from the realm of death. But we
must remember that as soon as Orpheus tried to communicate with
Eurydice after finding her, she was lost to him again.
How easy it is for us to sympathise with those who believe in
metempsychosis – the transmigration of souls. Such people at least
live their lives and preserve their dead in a familiar universe.
But if the survival of a soul is unconscious, what good does
it do? And since we are ourselves only by virtue of our
consciousness of ourselves, how can we say that it’s really we who
survive after death in metempsychosis?
How easy it is to understand the thinking of those who attempt to
enter into communication with the dead through spiritualism –
except that the ‘messages’ received from beyond are usually so
vague and disappointing that silence would seem preferable to
communication of this sort.
When we come face to face with the insurmountable barrier of death
which surrounds us, we can understand the state of mind of those
who are tempted to rebel. But it’s useless to rebel against
something we don’t understand. To rebel against something is to
reject something; but if we don’t understand what we want to rebel
against then, instead of rebelling, we should continue our search
for understanding/
The absurd and the mysterious are not the same thing. The absurd
is that which has no meaning and cannot have a meaning; but a
mystery is something that has more meaning than we have
understanding.
The problem, if one tries to express it simply, is this: why is it
that we know nothing about the other life? Why is it that we have
no communication with those who have died? And wouldn’t it be
easier to believe that death means extinction, annihilation,
rather than to believe that those who have died are now
indifferent to us and ignore us? These are questions that Christ
never answers.
Instead of answering, Christ acts. Jesus never explains. He lives,
and he gives life. He hints that he knows the secret of a life
that is stronger than death; that something of man survives death
just as consciousness somehow survives during sleep. For death,
like sleep, resembles annihilation, but for both of these there’s
an awakening which gives the lie to that similarity.
The essential factor that Jesus introduces is his absolute faith
in the omnipotence of love. Jesus is a free man, the only truly
free man, the only man who has loved and believed with sufficient
daring both to free himself from fear, from money, from habit,
from the law, and from death, and to free others from the same
things.
To encounter Christ is to be subjected to a violent appeal to free
oneself. ‘Do not be afraid’, was Jesus’ first recommendation to
Jairus in today’s Gospel. ‘Have faith!’ He taught that if a man
had a little faith, he would be delivered from slavery in all its
forms. And when Jesus’ listeners believed him, when his contagious
freedom infected them to the point that they experienced a sense
of freedom for the first time, they then discovered that nothing
was impossible to Him. The sick were freed from their infirmities,
the greedy were liberated from their love for money, the lustful
were freed from the needs of their flesh, the sinners regained
their innocence, and even the dead were restored to life.
Jesus restored man to the state in which he had originally been
created. For the first time it was possible to understand why man
had been created and to perceive the splendour of God’s plan. It
was revealed that man could be free, that he could become like
God. It was now possible to love man by seeing him as God saw him;
and it was possible to love God by seeing his image in man. Man
was filled with a great joy. He could begin to live!
The world he had known before Jesus’ coming was as nothing
compared to that which Jesus revealed. And the man who dared to
believe and to love as Jesus did, like Jesus could transform the
world. The raising to life of the daughter of Jairus, as described
in today’s Gospel, was the life-size representation of what every
man and woman felt happening within themselves when they cam into
contact with the Great Liberator. It was a precise explanation of
that startling proposition which caused some to flee in panic and
others to be catalyzed. When Jesus raised the daughter of Jairus
from the dead, it was our resurrection that he was enacting. Jesus
was offering to raise us up immediately while we are still alive.
‘The child is not dead, but asleep,’ he said. And the resurrection
he proposed to work in us was no less startling, and no less
life-giving, than that which he performed for the daughter of
Jairus.
Jesus didn’t make mere promises. He didn’t talk about a future
life. He dealt with immediate reality in such a striking way that
one could see, with astonishment, how few people actually wished
to live that life, how few actually wished to be so raised up from
the dead. ‘They laughed at him,’ the Gospel text tells us. ‘So he
turned them all out… and taking the child by the hand he said to
her Talitha, kum, which means Little girl, I tell you to get
up.’ The little girl got up at once and began to walk
about…’
It was only when the apostles began to believe in their own
resurrection that they began also to believe in the resurrection
of Christ. It was necessary for them, as it is for us, his
followers and disciples today, two thousand years on, to die to
their ambitions and prejudices and pessimism before they could be
raised up in the faith, joy and fearlessness of Jesus. They knew,
as indeed we do, that Jesus was alive in themselves only when they
felt themselves filled with the freedom of Jesus.
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