In the face of death, live humanly

Jesus, Stringfellow, and the call to live beyond the Powers | Lent 3, Year C

Luke 13:1-5

At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” (NRSV translation)

During my high school years, my family lived in a small community that had its own weekly newspaper. It was a gift, one that all too many small towns have lost, and the paper did a fair job of reporting the happenings of the town from the local politics to which church was hosting a spaghetti supper. The cover page of the newspaper, however, was always a source of either amusement or horror. Occasionally, the lead story would run with a headline such as “Swallows Return to Bridge,” which reported that the local Cliff Swallows had once again taken up residence on the highway bridge over the river. At my school there was a set of quintuplets, and every birthday since their first had been a front page story. Most often, however, the paper featured what the locals called the “wreck of the week.” From two cars locked in a mangled mess to a single car wrapped around a tree, the lead photo and story documented the disaster.

This small town newspaper brazenly embraced a tendency all of us have. When there’s a wreck, a fire, a medical emergency, or even a crime scene, we want to look and see what happened. Disaster draws our eyes. But it is also, often, more than disaster. The more time I’ve spent as a priest, I’ve come to recognize that what often lies behind our fascination is death itself. We look over at the car wreck and we see the uncomfortable truth that life will end. But no sooner has that truth arrived then we begin our search for explanations as a means of escape. When someone dies we want to know “why.” Was it a health problem, an accident, the result of some miscalculation? We want to know so we can be assured the same will not happen to us.

It was not until I read the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time that I came to understand these questions. Heidegger says that human beings have a profound tendency to avoid death. Rather than facing the reality of our own end, the bare fact that we will all die, we try to keep that fact away from ourselves. This is not to say that we don’t recognize that human beings die, instead Heidegger says that we deny that we will die. Death is something he says happens in the sphere of what he calls the “theyself,” a generalized public crowd, while our own individual personhood is protected. That’s why we need explanations for why someone died; it is why we are fascinated by wrecked cars and toppled buildings. Somehow, by giving our attention to what has happened to others, we insulate ourselves from the truth that death will come for us.

Long before Heidegger, Jesus knew this truth. He knew that we look at the deadly disasters that befall others as a way of keeping ourselves from facing our own deaths. It is this truth and the way out of it that are at the heart of our Gospel reading this Sunday.

Ancient Palestine had no local newspaper, but news got around all the same. In Jesus’s teaching, he refers to two incidents that were being told and retold along the roads and in the markets. In one, the Romans, at the order of their governor Pilate, had killed a group of Jewish pilgrims. This could have referred to any number of Roman actions against the citizens of Israel, but it is possible that Jesus is referring to a specific incident in which a group of Jews were protesting the use of Temple funds for a Roman waterworks project. Pilate had all the protestors slaughtered in short order.

The other incident, again an all too common occurrence in a place where colonial construction projects were often completed to subpar standards, could be connected to the first. Ched Myers suggests that the Tower of Siloam could have been a part of the Roman aqueducts whose funding had been made with the very Temple funds at the center of the protest.

Whatever the case, it is clear that as news traveled of these two deadly disasters. And people did what they still do—they constructed an explanation that kept those deaths comfortably in the “theyself,” far from having to face the possibility that such a death could come for them.

It is this avoidance that Jesus takes head-on. He wants his disciples to know that death can never stay comfortably on the front page, or fenced behind the explanations of what happened to other people. And this is all the more true when Death itself is a power, an agent of those anti-creational forces that are at the heart of every Empire. Rome like all the Empires before it and after it, did not seek flourishing for the whole, but instead relied on extraction and exploitation to maintain its vampiric life. It’s power was kept in place by maintaining the fear of death, of which crucifixion was a key tool and threat.

The crucified were those that Rome put up in a display of terror, a warning for everyone to see the consequence of disobedience to their death dealing ways. It was that terror that Jesus confronted on the cross. He did not keep death at a safe distance, locked away with the horrors that happen to other people. He faced the worst the the powers of death could bring, and he showed that such power was not the last word. In that act, claiming the power of Life, “he disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them” as Paul says in Colossians 2:15.

But before the cross, and the victory of resurrection that follows it, Jesus calls on us to confront the power of Death in our every day lives. Jesus calls this move metanoia—repentance, a change of heart and life. The response to the news of the disasters of Empire should not be a blame that insulates us from such an end, but instead a radical re-shifting of our lives outside of the very systems of Death on which the Empire depends.

What does this repentance look like? Over the last few weeks, I’ve been wrestling with this question for the powers of Death have again been at play. The forces of Empire still make idolatrous claims over the given world of creation and human life. And as a result the creation stands ravaged, the poor exploited, and the rich take an ever greater share of what was meant to be the commonwealth of all the living.

In the tumultuous middle decades of the last century there was a man who brought the Word into confrontation with the powers of this Empire. He was a lawyer named William Stringfellow. After graduating from Harvard Law School he moved to a slum in Harlem and set to work defending the poor against illegal evictions and discrimination. His work was directly rooted in his close reading of the Bible, and was an expression of his baptism. For Stringfellow, as one biographer put it, “being a faithful follower of Jesus means to declare oneself free from all spiritual forces of death and destruction and to submit oneself single-heartedly to the power of life.”

Stringfellow went on to write more than 15 books that would make him widely regarded as the greatest theologian the Episcopal Church has ever produced. In one of those books, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, he offers a rousing call to confront the powers of death. I have it typed out and posted in my office:

In the face of death, live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the Word. Amidst babel, I repeat, speak the truth. Confront the noise and verbiage and falsehood of death with the truth and potency and efficacy of the Word of God. Know the Word, teach the Word, nurture the Word, preach the Word, defend the Word, incarnate the Word, do the Word, live the Word. And more than that, in the Word of God, expose death and all death’s works and wiles, rebuke lies, cast out demons, exorcise, cleanse the possessed, raise those who are dead in mind and conscience.

“In the face of death, live humanly.” That short sentence sums up the work of repentance, the change of heart and life to which Jesus calls us. In what does this human living consist? The Biblical answer could be summed up in the call to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. Working out the expression of that love in our contexts is a matter of discernment, but some general principles apply. For instance, as Ivan Illich pointed out, it is hard to love your neighbor while bombing them. It is hard to love your neighbor while subjecting their lives to constant surveillance and abuse for the sake of our own sense of security. And how can we love God with all our strength, that is with our resources and powers, when we invest our money in the very extractive economy that is destroying what God made and called good from its very beginning?

On its most basic level, living humanly means living on the scale of a merely mortal life. It is expressed in simplicity and enoughness, a participatory abundance rather than a possessive one. For my part, what I hear our Gospel this Sunday calling me toward is a slowing down, a deepening of my life. I want to read long novels for long hours. I want to cook meals from scratch for my family. I want to grow as much of my own food as I can and deal, as much as possible, directly with waste produced from my household. I want to have time for interruptions, especially those that come from neighbors in need. I want to spend less time looking at screens or trying to achieve some fleeting sense of success. I want, most of all, to live with the presence that marks any love—a presence to God, a presence to those near to me. Such presence is not possible in a rush of busyness, it is not achievable when my mind is set on the next thing, the more to which I am always tempted. Jesus is working to remind us that all too often this rush is just a way of avoiding the truth that death will come for us all, and it will dominate our lives if we fear it. If we want to live, then we should get going with living, in the most human way we can.