February 14, 2013

Love and Death


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?

(Sorry for any grammatical errors, but editor has been busy. Happy Valentines Day! - Steven)




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