Editorials
death with dignity? reflections on good friday
In the New Church we are not fixated on the Lord’s crucifixion because we do
not believe that His death on the cross constituted the whole of redemption.
We believe it was the last of the temptations by means of which He subjugated
the hells and glorified His Human nature. And it was those accomplishments,
not His death itself, that redeemed us.
But His death, and the manner of it, was an integral part of the process,
and there is much to be learned from it. The fact that He was “a Man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief,” the fact that He suffered and died, as we do, enables
us to see Him as a God of compassion who can empathize with our suffering
and with whom we can identify.
After His resurrection, just before ascending into heaven, He said: “I
am with you always.” And we can believe it because we know that whatever
states of despair befall us, He has already gone through them. No human
pain is unexplored territory, but one whose terrors have been confronted and
conquered, and are now perpetually held in check by His presence. “If I make
my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there.”
Ours is a God who knows what it is to suffer and go through the valley of
the shadow of death. And He was more alone in that valley than anyone else
ever is. We always have Him with us, while He “trod the winepress alone.” The
Divine was always present with Him, but in the depths of His Human despair
He felt forsaken by God, as He cried out on the cross.
There was more to His suffering than His own pain and death. It was not
God’s failure to save Him that tormented Him as He died on the cross, but His
own (apparent) failure, as God incarnate, to save others, the sheep of His own
flock. The appalling, humiliating, excruciating way in which He died physically
was on top of the spiritual anguish He felt.
“Death with dignity” was not His lot, but it could have been. The Lord
chose to submit to a death that was anything but dignified. As He told one of
His companions in Gethsemane who drew his sword to resist on the night He
was arrested: “Put your sword in its place .... Do you think that I cannot now
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