Jesus Against the Clock
Death sure is obnoxious. It gets in the way of all my plans and goals. I will never have all the experiences I want to have in life because I’ll have to die first. I’ll never accomplish all the work I want to. No matter how well I take care of my body and my mind, I will run out eventually and end up dead and buried. Life and accomplishments seem futile. Eventually, our work will be forgotten (if you’re looking for a Biblical citation, I don’t have a specific chapter or verse, but check out just about the entire book of Ecclesiastes). We’ll pass things off to successors, and maybe if we do really well, we will have some sort of statue put up to commemorate us after we’re gone, but that doesn’t stop the great interruption. We can make sacrifices every day in pursuit of a greater goal, but eventually those sacrifices will be forgotten. What’s the point in working hard when death is always looming?
The values and beliefs we hold now are different than what people held three hundred years ago. Sure, in broad terms some things last forever. We share the values of charity, hard work, and liberty with our ancestors, but over time the way we understand even those things changes. There was a time when it was considered loving to subject a child to physical punishment as a way to teach them right from wrong. Spanking, hitting with a belt, open hand slaps, even a stick were considered how a loving parent interacted with their child (Proverbs 13:24). These opinions have fallen out of favor in recent years with advancements in child psychology. While individual liberty was of paramount importance at times in the past, many thinkers today are seeing liberation as something that communities experience. If this trajectory holds, then we can assume that three generations after we are gone, our ethics will be largely forgotten. What is the point of dedicating time and mental and emotional resources to working out our values, when they will die with us?
Even things that feel permanent will eventually come to an end. The tree you plant today will almost certainly outlive you, provided you care for it properly, but it will die. Coastlines will change. Mountains will erode. Eventually, scientists believe the sun will explode and completely consume the earth in a wave of unsurvivable heat, obliterating the atmosphere, rendering earth a lifeless, waterless hunk of rock and metal floating in space. Fortunately, that isn’t supposed to happen for a few billion years yet, so we will be long gone before then. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it look good for the permanence of life on earth. No matter how hard we try, everything comes to an end. There is no escaping the binding power of death. So, what’s the point?
Where is the freedom? How are we supposed to freely work knowing that it is all ultimately in vain? How can we be expected to believe in what we do if it doesn’t have a lasting effect? Is a human life just a chain of useless sacrifices until we die? Where is the hope in that? What are we working for?
The priests in ancient Israel faced a similar problem as our reading from Hebrews (7:23-38) explains. They would offer sacrifices for the people, but they would also need to offer sacrifices for themselves, and no matter how well they did, they would ultimately be limited by death. They couldn’t offer sacrifices good enough to last for all time, and they couldn’t go on forever. They died, and it seemed that their sacrifices were in vain. The pattern just had to continue as if they had contributed nothing. No progress was made. No permanent gains attained. Every new generation was back at step one.
This all changed with Jesus. Not only was his sacrifice enough for all people, but it was effective for all time. No new sacrifices needed to be made. The author of the Gospel of John didn’t see this as occurring outside the tradition of sacrifice. It was part of it. The end of it. Jesus took up the entire chain of sacrifices that had preceded him and completed them all. Joined into Christ’s sacrifice, the previous sacrifices were counted as sufficient. Jesus connected the work of previous high priests to himself and made their work vain no more. Finally, the hope that they had been waiting for was achieved.
The author of Hebrews makes clear that Jesus did this once for all. No further sacrifices were needed, and while this is very true of the Old Testament sacrificial system, I think the work of Jesus goes beyond just these literal sacrifices. Jesus brings permanence and finality to the fleeting power of old sacrifices, but Jesus also brings that same continuity to our work today.
Our sacrifices on behalf of our neighbor now are not just fleeting moments of kindness held together by the feeble chain of our own life stories. What we do for our neighbor is a blessing from God to them, caught up not as a vain thing, but as a plan intended by God, flowing through us to them, and becoming part of an eternal story: God’s story.
Death may always be looming over us, but that doesn’t mean our work here and now is robbed of its worth and power. Our deeds in life are caught up in God’s eternity, stories echoing in the halls of heaven until they become the bedrock that shapes the new heavens and the new earth. Our love lives on beyond us, because our love comes from God and is held forever by God.
So, yes our hard work will be forgotten by future humans, but we aren’t really asking them to remember for us. Yes, our values will be rejected by our descendants, but we aren’t really worried about them judging our deeds. Yes, every tree and mountain will eventually pass away. Even the earth itself will pass away, but we aren’t placing our hope in things that die, erode, and burn. We are placing our hope in God. We look to God for mercy for our deeds both good and bad. We trust that God will hold us in memory, when all the world falls apart. In Christ, we have permanence. In Christ, death is defeated.
