Giving Up Our Eternal Life Project: Only Jesus Lives

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Field Day January 5, 2023

Giving Up Our Eternal Life Project: Only Jesus Lives

Today, in the radio interview on her new book Lost and Found, author Kathryn Schulz said something that caught my attention: something to the effect that the greatest loss (“Lost”) is the difficult truth that what and who we do love and embrace, all of it, all of them, will, in fact, be at some point, gone.

Everything and everyone goes away. I think of my recently read This Life where the author, Yale Philosopher Martin Hagglund, espouses no afterlife but rather an enriched now life.  I think of my ongoing work at attempting to identify just what and how the gospel is not a happy ending (afterlife) to a troubled story but rather a troubled ending (everything and everyone goes away) to a happy story.

Once we see, know, come to our senses, that our projects, be they communal or personal, are finite and mortal, there is a resurrection in this life that occurs. I think of the book A Boy Thirteen, this little tome I read maybe 30 years ago now that seared my soul because of the author’s honesty and eventual conclusion of meaning and a way forward from the devastating loss of his teenage son. He discovered and named there is no silver lining to this loss, but rather only this: an opportunity to love. In other words, the death and loss catapults us back into the life we do have and still have and enriches its experience if not also its meaning.

This all jibes with understanding and seeing the resurrection of Jesus as being an event that does not tell us we live again if we attach ourselves to Jesus’ coattails, but rather that the self-giving love that refuses victory but rather claims loving unconditionally is the only thing that prevails, the only thing that lives on, the only eternal life. The resurrection of Jesus is about the resurrection of Jesus, not our life never ending. Yes, I know about “he is the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (I Corinthians 15) and because he lives we will live also (John 14). But do we see how all of that language about us living on because Jesus lives on is not about what and who we know not dying and going away at the end but rather what and who we know now being enlivened and enriched and celebrated with glorious jubilation? The resurrection of Jesus is about his life forever impacting our life now.

 I think of another story that placed a strong image in my mind’s eye years ago, the story of Barrington Bunny in Martin Bell’s The Way of the Wolf. The image: the death of the warm-hearted bunny in the cold and snowy night, all alone, but no, not all alone at all. The bunny Barrington died, yes, but standing sentinel beside him was the Silver Wolf who would not allow him to die alone and who stands at the guard and watch and protects that life that is dead and gone forever.

 It is mournfully sad, to be sure, that fact that there is not more of you, of me, of anything or anyone. We cannot get away from this shroud. But it is also the sad truth that our forces that deny this tough truth can be more brutal and destructive than the death itself. Ernest Becker in the now classic The Denial of Death describes humanity’s flight from death that then ruin and destroy life before death.

 There is an eternal life, but it is the never-ending life of God in Christ Jesus. It is not my life or your life. Will you or I or anybody we know or love live on? We do not know. Of course it is possible. But what does it matter? The Christian Bible tells a salvation story but that story is one of God breaking in and out upon our lives (well, in fact, creating life to begin with) to declare to us that it is unconditional and self-giving and self-sacrificing love that is eternal.

 My mother, 98, and father, 99, both died in the past 17 months. I miss them immensely. But will I ever see them again? I don’t think so. I may be surprised, but I don’t think so. But it really matters not.

 What matters is that God never gave up or gives up on God’s creation and instead followed and follows through to the bitter end (of Jesus) to make it completely clear and sure that in the bitterness there is no end, nor beginning. There is only love that endures all things, even death, and hopes all things, and never ends. Paul says this, now famously, in First Corinthians 13. Contrary to popular belief, this love that he speaks of there is not the passion of soon-to-be husband and wife as they stand at the altar at their wedding (where that Bible passage is so often read), but rather the love of Jesus Christ. It is his love, Jesus’ love, that never ends. Not our life nor our love, but his.

 And that is all that matters.