There are people who feel we shouldn't talk about death, much less teach it to young impressionable kids. (But it's ok to let our children play 'kill your enemies' on an I-pad playscreen? - Sorry, I don't get that). The fact of the matter is whether we teach them or not, children know living things, plants, animals, people die. My 3 kids had to deal with their father's death at a very very young age. I wasn't and will never be able to ease their pain or compensate their loss; I was having a hard enough time dealing with my own heart breaking. As a family, we all moved on; we manage without a husband, without a father. We are nothing exceptional anyway. Every human being needs to come to terms with death; others and our own, kings and beggars alike.
Death is actually all around us, if we care to look deeper beyond the mundaneness of ordinary life. The pessimist is quite right to say the minute we are born into life, we start to die. As it is, each one of us has a different way of handling death. Some blithely ignore it, singing the proverbial let's eat, drink and be merry tune, living for the moment, willing ourselves to think life is all there is; let death come when it will, so what. Some fear it. Many misunderstand it. Most don't fancy it; as Woody Allen said, "I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens."
I don't think my precocious 6 year old knew how profound her question - Can't God save..? - was. Can't God simply stop death and let everyone just live happily ever after? If He is a loving all powerful God, surely He can and surely He should. Reminds me of the story of the religious leader who approached Jesus in desperate faith to ask, “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live" (Mark 5:23). Jesus went, but was delayed by the crowd, specifically by an unnamed woman with a 12-year old bleeding problem. By the time He healed the woman, the girl was dead. So they told the father, "Your daughter is dead...Why bother the teacher (Jesus) anymore?” (Mark 5:35).
All this talk about God and faith. What good is it when everything ends in death anyway? Indeed why bother. The grave swallows up everything; and not just people. As one writer puts it, we all have secret grave-yards in our lives that hold dead stuff... ambitions, dreams, wishes, hopes, needs, ideals. For a little while, we want to believe that there is a God who will answer the desires of our hearts; He must if He loves us. But He delays one day...one month...one year...10 years...20 years...Nothing's happening. So we stoically bury them and keep them buried because it hurts too much to dig them up again, what's the point. We give them up to death; let's just move on to 'other' things. Let it go, in fact let God go. Leave it, don't bother Him. When we come face-to-face with death, staring at a yawning grave, faith itself dies and its easy to conclude there is no God, nor is there any need for one.
But Jesus told the grief-stricken father, "...Just believe" (Mark 5:36) Those must be the toughest 2 words in the entire Bible. Believe when humanly all is dead and gone; when there seems to be nothing? It's just like Mary protesting to Jesus at Lazarus' grave...but but but..“Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days.” We have all sorts of "but's" not to believe God. We give up at death because we think that's all there is to life. But Jesus proved the whole truth - that there is not only life, there is not only death; there is resurrection life.
Yet no one - then and even now - had faith in Christ as the Resurrection Life. They had faith that He was a great teacher, a good man. That was it. No one ever considered He could bring life out of death, for no one understood the faith that goes beyond even death. Even after He showed them there really is more than life and death, when He lived, died on a cross and then came back with a bang - gloriously alive after 3 days in the tomb. Even now, people mock, doubt and spin endless theories about the greatest event recorded in the Bible - the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christianity would have been so much easier to believe in and follow if Jesus had just confined Himself to being a 'good fella' who taught good things, like all other 'good' human teachers who have lived and died throughout the history of time. Why complicate things with God in the picture? Why cook up a(n impossible) story about a dead Savior who came back alive if it was only about following another religion of rules and regulations?
The deeper I dig, the more I find Christianity is really the hardest 'religion' around, perhaps or rather precisely because it's not meant to be a religion in the first place. It's about a Person who stretches me beyond my own capabilities, my own ideas of what and how I want God to be like. How do you explain a God who saves, not by stopping death, but by bringing new life out of the dead, for it was only after dying that Jesus got resurrected forever more; breaking the cycle that bound humans to earthly life-times and straight away opening for believers the gateway to immortality into a realm where there is indeed no more suffering, no more pain, and truly no more death. You can't. It blows the mind. No wonder Jesus said, "Just believe". He didn't bother explaining theories. He didn't call for a committee meeting to discuss action plans. He didn't even preach a sermon. He just brought a dead girl back to life for her heart-broken, faithless father. Something no human being, no matter how good or clever, can do. That should tell us who Jesus is, really.
I don't have any proof about His claims of deity. But I guess if my heart (not just my head) is open to listening, if I want to experience (not to dissect and theorize about) life, death and something more, all I am required to do is just believe.
"In Him was life; and the life was the light of men" - John 1:4
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