Life Before and After Death
Yesterday I sat at my desk to write a couple of infant baptisms for this weekend… and then quickly shift into writing a funeral for the dad of a friend from school, also for this weekend.
A swirling cocktail of life and death. The celebration of life and the mourning of death.
Which I also found as an invitation for us to peer into a short letter from a guy named John, the first of three small writings tucked in the back of the Biblical library.
1 John 3:11, 14: For this is the message you have heard from the beginning—we should love one another… We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers and sisters. The one who does not love remains in death.
What John does here is quite brilliant, because he is giving us a much broader and deeper understanding of life and death. In the ancient world, life and death were far more than breathing and not breathing. You could be dead while also being alive. You could be living in death.
And the Greek word for passing from death to life, metabainō, means to pass over from one place to another. And John says that happens when we love, we pass from death over to life… before the stop breathing kind of death.
And the word for love is the Greek word, zōē, which exists outside the restrictions of time and space. They had a different word that was used for the day to day, circumstantial living. That word is, psychē.
So within our psychē, we are invited to step into zōē, which is found in loving one another.
Stunning.
In this season of Lent, we are continuously dying to anger, deceit, bitterness, jealousy, and all other chaos lurking around us… trying to get in us. In dying we pass over into living, that is a zōē kind of living.
We can choose life before death, which I would argue clears up any discussion about life after death.
So, may we choose love. This is to choose life that transcends, yet includes, time and space, today and tomorrow.
Apparently Jesus was willing to go through death, so that kind of living can be ours.
