There is this faint memory that I have from when I was young,
of my grandpa and me riding our bikes down in the riverbed in Riverside,
California. In my memory, the sky is a blue only found in the deepest of eyes.
The ground below us is a dark black with bright yellow painted lane lines the
cut threw the sea of black rushing below us. Trees protrude up into the sky as
if they were trying to pierce the heart of the majestic sky. A skinny
meandering river runs shows threw the cracks of the tree branches and green
leaves. As I look forward into the sea of blue and black ahead of me, I see my
grandfather riding ahead of me on his 1980’s slim-rimmed 10-speed look back and
smiles at me.
When I hit third grade my grandpa asked me if I wanted to go
on a bike ride with him. No little sister or grandma, just him and me. When he
first asked me, I felt as if there was a part of me that had graduated into
manhood: as if a part of my childhood had passed away and I was entering into a
new phase. He took me out to the newer of two bikes and pointed to the bike
that I would ride. The bike had brand new tires on it and shined from the
polish applied only hours earlier.
As I got on the bike, I asked my grandpa, “where we were
going?”
He just said,
“for a ride.”
A few miles later, we ended up at a 1970’s dinner complete
with wood paneling and the sad-looking, but friendly waitress with the newest
trend in 90’s hairstyles. We sat there and talked about friends, family, girls,
and of course our favorite topic: Lakers basketball.
I will never forget the one summer day before the beginning
of 6th grade. I asked my grandpa if we were going to go on a bike
ride. In responses he simply said, “sure I think I can for a little, my back
has been hurting me a little lately.”
A week or so later, I found out my grandpa had cancer in the
area of his lover back. When I found out, I knew that I might have to
experience something I had never been through before, the death of a loved one.
Almost a year later, my grandpa lost his battle with cancer
and passed away. I remember not quite knowing what to do at the funeral, and to
this day I only have a few memories of that day. One thing I remember was a
walk I took with my dad. We didn’t say much to each other, but the walk meant a
lot to me. One thing I do remember my dad saying to me, “death sucks,” in the
way only my dad could.
In response, I just nodded my head, “yes,” and continued to
cry.
Over the last few weeks I have been meditating on 1 John
4:7-21 and reflecting on the death of Christ and the Love of God. I had thought
for a long time that love and death exist in tension with one another: almost
as two exist as polar opposites that are bound by some cosmic certainty. Lately
though, my perception of death and love has started to change.
We are told in 1 John 4:10, “This
is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an
atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
For John, the definition of Love
is bound to the “atoning sacrifice” of Christ on the cross. Even in the famous
statement of Jesus in John 3:16, we see a God who reveals his Love for us
through death: “For God so loved the world
that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish
but have eternal life.”
For the disciple whom Jesus
loved, Death and Love cannot be separated. There is an eternal reality in which
love itself is bound to the death. For the disciple, the cross of Christ
reveals the truest form of love. Therefore, it should not surprise us to see
that later on in 1 John 4, the disciple makes this simple but complex
statement, “God is love.”
God is Love because he reveals
what true love is in the death of his Son. In this action, God not only reveals
what it means to love, but also links death to love and love to death.
This reflection has pushed me to abandon my previous view of
love and death as polar opposites, and made me believe that they are two as
slides of the same coin. As if to get to one reality, you have to pass threw
the other. It is only by passing through one side of the coin does a person
have a greater understanding of the other’s beauty. Or said in a Biblical
sense, it is only through death can one experience a resurrection into the love
of God.
It is when we recognize the God who faced death to
demonstrate his love for his creation, that we can grasp the deep love of God. The
love of God only then moves us toward the act of discipleship where God calls
us to “take up our cross” and die to ourselves. We are invited by God to face
death in order to not only find life and be resurrected, but to be resurrected
into the love of our triune God.
It has been 15 years since my grandfather passed away and I
have no doubt that when he died, he passed through death into the love of God.
As followers of Christ, we are called be people who daily
pass from death into the love of God. So that we not only
experience God’s love breaking into our world, but that we might join in and
become the love that God uses to break into the dark places of death in this
world.
Therefore, for those who are called to pass through death
into life, how is God calling you to pass through death into his love?
