Brussels. Istambul. Lahore. And a thousand other places that we didn’t hear of or forgot. Start your list in 2001. Start it in 1991. Start it at the dawn of humanity. In E.B. White’s the Sword and the Stone, written in what many would see as a gentler age, a young Arthur’s dreams take him to the dawn of humanity that begins with one man slaying another.
Identify the perpetrators of these inhumanities: Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the IRA, The Weathermen, The Red Brigade. If you like you can identify English kings, Mongol warriors, American generals, Fascist dictators, Syrian dictators, Salvadoran death squads, French bishops, South African police. (My list is not even extensive, much less complete. It would be shorter to list the innocent than the guilty.) It makes little difference.
Each member of this inter-religious, ecumenical, international, global fellowship of terror was unique in motives, methods, and social context. Each thus demanded a specific remedy; a painful and almost always violent exorcism lasting only until the next possession. What they all have in common is that they used mass death as a political and military tool; whether they rained down death from the sky, or used suicide bomber vests, or artillery shells filled with poison gas, or hard men appearing in the dark of the night and leaving empty beds, or guillotines, or garrotes.
Why death? Because death is the greatest ally of the terrorist. Indeed I would argue that Death is the ultimate terrorist, the one whose power can most dominate us through fear.
And while the proximate solutions to terrorism will be legal, political, and military the ultimate solution must be to destroy Death. As long as Death is alive as a force within the human heart it will have supplicants willing to worship it by becoming its hands and feet in the physical world. They will do Death’s deeds in return for what it promises: a iron grip on such humans as fear it and following on that whatever power; spiritual, political, economic, social the fearful will surrender to Death’s servants.
And it is a double loss for those vanquished by their fear of the servants of Death. It will have their bodies regardless, and now in addition it will claim their souls. Those who deny the rights of their fellow citizens and cheer for the bombing of innocent children out of fear of terror will die in any case. We all die. They will die without honor.
For us as Christians the answer to death is Easter. We believe that in Christ we do not die because Christ has vanquished death. But you do not need to believe this, indeed you can dismiss it as a myth, and still win a victory over death and the pitiful terrorists who worship it. That non-sectarian victory is won by refusing to submit to fear. It is won by cherishing higher ideals than mere survival.
It is easy to forget in the climate of modern preaching that the disciples of Christ weren’t invigorated and sent forth on a world-changing mission by the possibility that people can live forever. The Jewish people of Jesus’ day already believed that. Nor did Jesus, in all those resurrection appearances, tell them to “go forth and tell people that there is life after death!” Lots of people in the time of Jesus already believed that. Indeed virtually 100%. That wasn’t good news. That was old news.
The motive behind the Christian movement wasn’t the mere fact that a man was raised from the dead. That had happened before. It was that Jesus, the Christ, the Ruler of God’s Reign had defeated Death and its allies in the world so that life in the Reign of God was now a real human possibility. The Reign of God was no longer a dream awaiting a Messiah to make it come true. Experiencing it’s freedom was within the grasp of normal men and women who could fearlessly commit their lives to its ideals. They weren’t merely freed from Death and the fear of death – they were led into living as full, free human beings made in God’s image and working out what it means to be citizens of God’s Realm.
The resurrection of Christ isn’t about life after death. It is about restoring the possibility of life before death. It wasn’t merely the answer to an existential question, it is the answer to the political question of who reigns, and where. And it answered that question unequivocally.
And that is the post-Easter invitation that Christians can and should extend to everyone: join us, and we will join you, in rising above the fear of death to live out God’s Reign. We will no longer dedicate ourselves to building a walled city to guard us from death and a tower at its center to ascend to heaven. We will no longer babble with our ludicrous fears and inchoate dreams. We will tear down the walls and keep our feet on the ground where we belong and to which our bodies rightfully return.
“The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever.” (Rev. 11:15)
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