Generosity

Sometimes we use the phrase, “Life is a gift.” If it is a gift, we can add that it is a pretty generous one. To be alive is nothing we could have come up with on our own. None of us went to planning meetings on how we would come into being. The time, the place, the circumstances were not our decisions. We are grateful for but clueless about how all this came about.

Implicit in the concept of “Life as Gift” is the premise that someone gave it. Philosophers and theologians speak of God as Being—the One through whom all things come into being. It is not unusual for you and me to hold in mind the idea that God is the great Giver of life and of everything that exists. The whole cosmos, too enormous for us to comprehend, is the gift of God.

Then we come to ponder the nature of death. We wonder how that fits in with it all. I heard an extraordinary lecture by the great preacher, John Claypool on the subject of death. He told the story of losing his beloved pet dog as a young boy. The dog was gravely injured by the heavy screen door that shut on his little neck. There was nothing he could do about it. Gone was the little blessing in his life was. Just four years old, John, came to see death as a thief: a callous figure that takes things from you with no concern for your loss. So unfair! He came to see death as an obliterator. Something that heartlessly comes to annihilate something beautiful and valuable. Despite how you love this valuable part of your life, death ruins everything, and in grief, you suffer.

It is not a long walk from there to pinning this heartlessness on God. We see God as the giver of life, perhaps we also see God as the one who takes it away. Right after Job hears the horrible news that he has lost his large family to death, he offers up this pronouncement:

Naked I came from the womb,
naked I shall return whence I came.
The Lord gives and the Lord takes away;
blessed be the name of the Lord. (Job 1:21)

Really, from these lines, principally, comes the allusion: “the patience of Job”. I truly do not think this statement of God as giver and taker is intended to be a forced pronouncement of truth. Rather, it is an ideal coming from the unavoidable human labor of pondering and absorbing the mystery of life and death. Put it for a moment alongside another passage from the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew tradition. This passage we will hear as the first lesson at the Eucharist, Sunday:

God did not make death,
and he does not delight in the death of the living.
For he created all things so that they might exist;
the generative forces of the world are wholesome,
and there is no destructive poison in them,
and the dominion of Hades is not on earth.
For righteousness is immortal.

God created us for incorruption,
and made us in the image of his own eternity,
but through the devil’s envy death entered the world,
and those who belong to his company experience it.

—Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15; 2:23-24

These verses from the Apocrypha, make claims very different from what we recalled from Job’s attestation. You can see how this school of thought puts death as a part of life that came into the world through the trouble-making of the devil. In this passage, we find God to be the generous Creator that made us in the very image of God for incorruption, and so, for eternity.

It is all very mysterious. All of the scriptures for this Sunday point to God in Christ as the Giver and Sustainer of life. In our human reasoning, we see death as an ominous, inevitable ender of things. In reflections this week we will listen to the revelation from these passages that God is bigger than death. What we see as fearsome, God sees as manageable. We will see how Jairus, whose little daughter falls into the hands of death, hears Jesus say, “Do not fear, only believe…The child is not dead but sleeping...Little girl, get up!” And you know what happened: she got up, returning to vitality.

The human community was responding to the frightening situation very naturally, but Jesus was responding as God, the Being, who is the source of all being. God gives life, and even death is another gift of a larger life. John Claypool’s message is still viewable on YouTube – “Hopeful Coping with Grief”. In it, he makes the inspiring point that death is neither thief nor annihilator, as he had thought as a child. This is because Christ is who he is. So, death becomes a very special birth into a new offering of life, wondrous beyond our imagination. Jesus turns death into a portal to that glorious new life. The Generous one gives and gives, without end.