The Boiling Pot
I am in Livingstone and watching the furious Zambezi rage
against the indignity of squeezing through narrow gorges and coming to a
momentary halt before a wall of rock at a place given the name of “The Boiling
Pot.” Some of the water recoils in anger and tries to flow back against the
stream, but it doesn’t stand a chance against the thrust of a million years
carrying it to the sea.
There is an inevitability about death and destiny. It we
ignore it, put it out of our minds and never even think of it, we are like that
water trying to find its way back to something that has gone for ever. Yet modern
culture, by which I mean the optimism based on technology and science, while
not denying death, cannot easily fit it into the scheme of things.
Modern people do not have an understanding of death beyond
the physical and biological. The Christian understanding of death as the
crowning point of life faithfully lived, when a person finally achieves his or
her goal, sounds pure nonsense. This last week Pope Francis eased the process
by which Catholics, in marriages that clearly are not working, can obtain an
annulment – a judgement that states there never was a marriage there from the beginning
because the mutual consent was impaired.
While Catholics welcomed this further sign of Francis
wishing to remind us of the gospel message of compassion, nonreligious people
on the internet simply cannot understand why it is even an issue. “I don’t need
a church to tell me about my marriage,” raged one. “Do we still have religion
trying to interfere in our lives?” said another. “I though all that antique
business about religion had died out long ago, in the middle ages,” said a
third.
What these and similar comments suggest to me is a lack of human
horizon seems to mark modern life. People just live for the present. They
cannot conceive of a future that is beyond what science can tell us and they
have no curiosity as to what religion has to say about it. Theologians would
say they have no idea of ‘transcendence’, that is, anything beyond what can be
touched and measured.
Yet mankind has intuited for millennia that we cannot
provide final answers and that the future will reveal our destiny to us once we
die. For the Christian, absorbed in Jesus and his message, everything makes
sense because we know that even he longed for, what he called, “my baptism”,
that is, his death and glorification which he knew would be the fulfilment of
his mission. For the Christian, who is one with Christ, this makes perfect
sense as the fulfilment of all his or her longing and striving while living on
this earth. Isaiah foretold his death and the gospels all repeatedly refer to
it. The implication is: this all has to be There is sadness for the bereaved
but for the person who dies it is the moment when everything makes sense beyond
their wildest imagining.
September 13, 2015 Sunday
24 B
Isiah 50:5-9 James
2:14-18 Mark:8:27-35
