The search for the Fountain of Youth has never ended. Humans have always been trying to cure themselves of Mortality's children - Aging, Disease, Plague, Famine, War, Flood, &c. The most unhealthy thing that can happen to you is to die.
Death is a natural process, but everything in us screams DEATH IS NOT NATURAL!!! when we are faced with it. Face a corpse and see how natural you feel. We can't look at a body stripped of its spirit without a deep sense of strangeness. Death is so wrong for us.
Why, when people come to the end of their lives, do they wonder at "how quickly time went by"? A minute is always 60 seconds, an hour is always 60 minutes, a day is always 24 hours. We have never known time to be any slower; death has always come at the same, ceaseless pace, so when we meet it, why are we so surprised? To have a sand glass emptying our lives away is so wrong for us!
What would you say to a man who, not only affirmed the existence of a Fountain of Youth, but claimed to be the very Fountain!
Some said, "This saying is hard, who can accept it?"
One said, "You have the words of eternal life."
Others said, "Crucify him!"
Are we so resigned to the wrong of death that we would kill One who offered the right? He claimed, "Whoever believes has eternal life," "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life." "I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish."
I don't know about you, but I think I would like to be immortal! Not living forever with pain and decay, but with love and vitality. This man offers that! And He is called the "Firstborn from the Dead" -- having ascended from this earth in a physical, human, but imperishable body. He sent for his mother in the same way, and He promises us a "Resurrection from the Dead."
I think I will enter His Immortality School. I'll feast and celebrate on the Firstborn's birthday - Sunday - when He was born from a tomb to an everlasting life. I'll follow His words to the death, and without fear, because He literally conquered death.
Death has no power over me; I am freed! Alleluia!
2 comments:
beautifully put.
This reminds me of something Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said in his "Introduction to Christianity". "In contrast to the dualistic conception of immortality expressed in the Greek body soul schema, the biblical formula of immortality through awakening is trying to impart a collective and dialogic conception of immortality: the essential part of man, the person, remains; that which has ripened in the course of this earthly existence of corporeal spirituality and spiritualized corporeality goes on existing in a different fashion."
You see, we live on, not by virtue of our own power but because we are known and loved by God in such a way that we can no longer perish.
God speaks to us in "The WORD". The WORD is Jesus. He is the resurrection and the life. When we carry on in conversation with God in this "dialogical" way we remain eternally in the memory of God or mind of God so to speak. The collective aspect is that all human beings that enter into this dialogue enter through only the one Way. Jesus is the Word and the Way. Unity is the inevitable consequence of matriculation in the school of immortality.
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