Life and Death in Christian Perspective

This last weekend for our confirmation class the set topic (scheduled six months ago) was “life and death in Christian perspective.” You might think that this is a pretty hefty topic for teenagers, but like all human beings, our young people do have big questions about death and what happens at the end of this life. I remember when I was a teenager myself, and my little Methodist church in southern Arizona held a 3-day youth retreat on death and dying. I credited this weekend with profoundly affecting my faith life. This retreat focused on the stories of congregation members who had dealt with the death of loved ones and how the church family had walked beside them during these times. We heard about how people’s faith in God was deepened in the midst of the experience of grief. We even heard one person’s story of a near-death experience in which he met Jesus, and Jesus told him it wasn’t his time, he needed to go back and live his physical life a while longer. Hearing these stories intrigued me, and I wanted to know more about this God who cares for us in life and death. I guess I am still on that faith journey to learn more about this God to whom we belong…in whose hand our breath is.

This last weekend in our confirmation class here at Pinnacle (there are currently 11 confirmands), the big question of the day for us to ponder was “Do I have a soul, and what happens to that soul when I die?” We learned that the Hebrew people had a word nefesh which we translate into English as “soul.” The nefesh, though, isn’t some ethereal, component part of us. The nefesh is the whole person: body, mind, spirit, strength…& soul, whatever that is. Each person is a nefesh; she or he doesn’t have a nefesh.  Seeing the “soul” this way sheds new light on scripture:

Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul (nefesh)!
2 I will praise the Lord as long as I live (hay-yai);
   I will sing praises to my God all my life long (continuously).

3 Do not put your trust in princes,
   in mortals, in whom there is no help.
4 When their breath (ruach) departs, they return to the earth;
   on that very day their plans perish.

Nefesh is a word that is closely associated with breath (ruach): I am a nefesh as long as I have ruach.

In this world we inhabit, we are in the midst of a pandemic that threatens life most specifically because it imperils the breath. I have a friend, who at 48 and athletic, spent 15 days in the hospital fighting for breath. By the grace of God, he came home. This week another friend lost his mother (60) to COVID; her final hours were spent fighting for breath.

If I am a whole being (body, mind & spirit), what part of me lives on when I breathe out the last time? Does some vital part of us carry on after this earthly life? The early Christians certainly thought of as eternal, but it’s hard to know if they thought of the whole person (body, mind, & spirit) spending eternity with God in paradise, or if it’s something like the breath…the spirit…the ruach…goes on, not in any physical way, but in an essential and vital way. The early Christians respected God’s creation of the body enough to believe that the “resurrection” included some physical reality. However, we have one instance when Jesus answers provocative questions along this line in this way:

24 “Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? 25 When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. 26 Now about the dead rising—have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? 27 He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” [Mark 12]

Jesus doesn’t set straight all our questions about life after death. He does however point to a greater mystery. “They do not marry.” Is this because they do not have bodies? “They are like angels.” And just exactly what are angels? I think Jesus wants us, his hearers, to know that when this physical life appears to end, there is something of us which lives on, but we are greatly changed. Through it all, whatever it is we become, the Biblical truth is: in life or death we belong to God.

The confirmands are now halfway through their year. At this point they are beginning to shape their own statements of faith. We encourage them to include in these statements something about who they are in God’s sight and what it means to live to God.

If you had to write your own answers to these questions, how would you answer? What part of you lives on with God?