Durable Hope
I've been reading Todd Billings' latest book, The End of the Christian Life: How Embracing Our Mortality Frees Us to Truly Live.
Billings, who is also the author of Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ writes intimately and with raw honesty about his experience as a Christian, a young father, and a theologian, and the intersection of those three with the unmovable mountain of incurable cancer. In his first book, Billings wrote from the lens of death as the enemy. This new book exchanges that lens, instead viewing death as an act of hope. I have been struck with the layers of hope that have built up in my heart as I've read this book. Death is supposed to be morbid, and something we avoid at all costs, right? And yet in surrendering the battle to avoid it, the call to look towards death as a part of life has brought with it a turning towards rest from the incessant need to avoid the inevitable. Billings writes,
While I write as a committed Christian, like many others I feel the cross-pressures of identity as I approach death. With the church, I trust God's promise that death will not have the final word. But I do so with an awareness that we could be wrong. I also realize that many others follow different paths. In facing death, mortals face a mystery we cannot master. My approach to the cross-pressures and this humbling mystery is not to set my Christian convictions on the shelf but to live into them, trusting that truth is possessed first and foremost by God. My ultimate hope is that I belong to the one who is the Truth, Jesus Christ, not that I am the owner of truth. (p. 15)
Billings takes on the prosperity gospel which would have us believe that it is not God's will for us to be sick - not ever. Prosperity preaching and teaching shapes Christians to view this life, this earthly existence, as the end-all-be-all. The idea of the now-and-not-yet is truncated, zooming in on the first half of the phrase. Ironically, Billings notes that according to a recent poll, Christians are far more likely to pursue aggressive treatments riddled with side effects in order to go on living, even if that means a few months or weeks. This fact gave me incredible pause as I remembered instances in of the lack of healing during church services being attributed to a weak faith, or some other box that needed checked in order for God to heal. Is this the God we love and serve? Really?
Billings admits that he, too, has been drawn to the promises of the prosperity gospel. And yet, he writes,
However when I hear Scripture speak about prosperity, it moves in a different direction. On the one hand, God desires shalom - communal peace, wholeness, and flourishing - for his creatures. Yet this flourishing differs from the kind that we pursue on our own. In the wisdom of the God of Jesus Christ, human flourishing has a cross-shaped, cruciform character. Indeed, the peace of shalom testifies to a more fundamental reality - the rule of the crucified and risen Lord, the King of the kingdom. In the Lord's Prayer we pray for God'skingdom to come rather than for our own wishes for flourishing to be fulfilled. (p. 124)
I've had many "moments" with this book, but one that has most recently struck me is Billings' look at the Sermon on the Mount.
In the Sermon on the Mount, it is good to be blessed. But this "blessed" is a far cry from the "#blessed"that adorns so many photos of status and physical prospering on social media. Being blessed, in Jesus's sermon, doesn't mean flourishing with health or material prosperity; it also doesn't mean masochistically seeking to suffer. Rather it involves an ache, a lament, a looking forward to a coming order in which the kingdom of God turns our notions of status and prosperity upside down. (p. 139)
Later in the Billings' book, is a story of a man who chose to stop fighting his cancer and instead to enter hospice care. Billings writes,
He chose this path not in order to live longer but to use his last days of breath in fellowship with God, with others and with nature. (p. 145)
Fellowship with God
Fellowship with others
Fellowship with nature
Something in my heart leaped at that sentence. Isn't that really the essence of abundant life?
What would it mean to live in such fellowship now as a human who isn't battling incurable disease? How would this impact how I approach - even embrace - my own coming death? Would such an approach call me away from wounding others, from sinning against God and others in order to get ahead and ensure my own survival?
Billings labels such an approach a "different kind of prosperity," one that "cannot be measured by status, a bank statement, or even a life span." (p. 146) Instead, this embrace of weakness enables us to truly embrace shalom, that wholeness that comes through the relinquishment of control. Chapter 5 of the book concludes with the story of Claude, a man who prayed the Heidelberg Catechism in his final moments,
What is your only comfort in life and in death?
That I am not my own, but belong - body and soul, in life and in death -
to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.
This is our durable hope. We do not belong to ourselves, but to a faithful Savior whose wisdom and love outstrips the short span of our earthly lives, one by whom we always have been and always will be known. Jesus Christ truly is the owner of truth, and we belong to him.