AGAINST DEATH
Hope AGAINST DEATH
John 5:25-47
Preached by Aaron Youngren
October 23, 2011
Where did you spend your childhood? Where did I? It’s a somewhat complicated question.
Was I in the Northwest from one to eight, and then in the Coachella Valley from nine to sixteen? Yes. I remember these places vaguely. But did I not also spend a great deal of my childhood in Hyrule, and Brinstar, and Norfair? Yes indeed. And riding in Sophia, climbing the mountains of Argool, and scaling heights and sounding depths till liberty once more dwelt in the Mushroom Kingdom.
I could not, to this day, tell you what my address was when I was ten, but if you stopped me on the street and said, “I’m having trouble finding the White Sword,” I would say with a laugh, “That’s easy! Find the river under the Northern Mountain and go into the cave above the lady in the waterfall.”
What did we talk about in those summer afternoons? “B-A Start? Or B-A-B-A start? I think it’s B-A-Start.”
What did we fight about? “Next game!”
And we wept, my brother and I, when Dr. Light had at last to dismantle fair Mega Man. “Goodbye, strange warrior! So long! Alas, you were too good for this world.”
At Robert Kennedy’s I saw the end of tyranny, the evil Ganon slain. At David Eliason’s I saw Metropolis rise from barren wasteland. And hope rested in the four block tetronimo: our hearts leapt at it’s appearing, sung freedom songs when the brutal wall at last came crumbling down.
“Games,” our parents called them, but were they? Not to us.
In his wonderful book, Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton credits the fairy tales of his youth for helping him see the truth of Christianity, for in the fairy tale he found a world truer than that advocated by modernity. “It is not Earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth,” he writes. “So, for me at least, it was not Earth that criticized Elfland, but Elfland that criticized the earth.”[1]
Elfland, I believe, was what drew my generation again and again to Link and his counterparts. We were presented worlds in which change could be had. Exploration led to reward, bravery to victory. In the event we got it wrong, we could simply try again. If that didn’t work? Reset.
Progress was actually possible, for there neither moth nor rust destroyed, and if thieves broke in and stole, well, the whole point of the thing was we could steal back.
“Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!”
And not once did this deter us, for in this world hope did, and indeed could rightfully, exist.
• • •
As long as we’re walking down memory lane, who remembers Full House season seven, episode five, “Fast Friends”?
Here’s the plot: Stephanie Tanner is in Junior High. It’s week three, and she still hasn’t made friends.
But what’s this? A grunge-clad seventh-grader says hello. Perhaps what Stephanie has been waiting for? Alas, the new friend is impolite and disrespectful (she calls her mother by her first name). Stephanie’s father, Danny Tanner, intones careful reservations about the new friend. Strife and consternation ensue.
At precisely eleven minutes and twenty-two seconds (the halfway point of the show), all these tensions arrive at a crisis. Stephanie and new friend are offered cigarettes in the girls restroom.
Stephanie declines, is ostracized, and at precisely thirteen minutes and twenty-one seconds is brought to despair of life itself.
From these depths she manages to call in for advice to Uncle Jesse and Uncle Joey’s radio show, feigning a Russian accent. Between the inevitable cartoon character impressions and hair stroking, she receives sage wisdom.
“Any friend who makes you smoke is no smoke at all.”
“Kissing a girl who smokes is like kissing an ashtray.”
“It’s just not cool.”
Just when things couldn’t get any worse, her father appears, having overheard the whole ordeal. But lo! He is not angry! What is that expression on his face? Compassion!
Stephanie folds: “Dad, did kids every try to get you to smoke? What should I do? Should I be her friend?”
Cue strings and piano.
The oracle speaks: “Honey, you’ve got to trust your instincts. If you think she should be your friend, she should. If not, not. Hey. Hang in there, kiddo. Believe it or not, it gets easier.”
I ask you, why did we not see an epidemic of televisions thrown out windows in the nineties? Did no one above the age of thirteen actually watch these shows? Full House lasted eight seasons. Eight! Where was the CIA? The FBI? The president? Did no one witness these things and think, “For the good of God and country, something must be done!”
“Believe it or not it gets easier.” It does? When?
After the show, Mary-Kate Olson checked into a rehab clinic for anorexia, and Dave Coulier became famous for receiving entirely unironic oral sex from twenty-year-old Alanis Morissette. At least Uncle Jesse got a gig on ER. Bob Saget, on the other hand, is apparently damned to end his days believing that a grown man trying to shock people with four letter words is funny.
“It’s television,” you may say, “What do you expect? You can’t take it too seriously.” But we watched it, as they say, religiously, did we not?. And not just D.J. and Michelle. We can add to the list Balki Bartokomos, and Uncle Phil, and Steve Urkel, and (Lord have mercy) Screech.
Yes, we were entertained (how I do not know). But also we sat at the feet of these sages.
Can we honestly say our ritual imbibing never led to inebriation? Of course it did. It’s why we find humanism so hard to quit. For years it was our diet, our habit, our daily bread.
• • •
Why do we love false hope?
We do, don’t we? It isn’t merely that we’re content to see our empty, desperate media habits as harmless. We believe false hope of any kind harmless.
It may be our generation’s most wicked sin.
• • •
Jesus says in the book of John,
Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man.
Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.
Jesus speaks here to a diverse crowd. Disciples, religious leaders, political leaders all gathered to hear him. One such group was the Pharisees, who provided strict spiritual leadership for the Jewish people, and were generally respected for their insight.[2]
Reading about Jesus’ encounters with the Pharisees is terrifying. These leaders believed in the God of the Old Testament and the Resurrection.[3] They would have greeted most of the above with a loud, “Amen.” Still, Jesus repeatedly insisted that they were deeply deceived, and that they, by leading others in deception, committed greater evil than any who had gone before them.[4]
You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.
I often hear people say, “He believes in God,” or “She doesn’t believe there’s a heaven.” Well, the Pharisees believed in God. They believed there would be a final judgment. They believed in a better heaven than most in our unimaginative West will ever muster. Yet Jesus insists they are doomed.
Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. If you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”
This is terrifying, I say, because at the time the Pharisees might have been the most hopeful people on the planet. It was their hope, not their despair, that damned them.
• • •
Imagine a large family gathered together on Christmas Eve. There are three brothers. The two youngest, a lawyer, and a stockbroker, hate the elder, a fireman, and refuse to speak to him.
In the middle of the night, the family wakes to smoke and flames. The brothers, after having helped the others escape, are themselves trapped together inside. The younger brothers thus find themselves on the horns of a dilemma, for asking the eldest for help would not only be breaking their chosen silence, but also putting themselves in a position of weakness.
They must choose quickly. The youngest breaks, and asks the older what should be done. This angers the third brother. He desperately points to other solutions that might be had, trying to convince the youngest to stay. But youngest has chosen, and soon the time for waiting is done. Youngest and oldest escape, and the third brother perishes in the flames.
As we hold in our minds this image of those consuming flames, let us consider the brother who chose not to ask for help. How did his life end? Was he terrified? Did he lie down on the floor and just give up? Or did he perish believing, to the last, that one of his plans for escape would actually work?
Did he have hope? Did he think he would make it out? Were his hopes good? Were they helpful?
What if it was his hope that kept him from crying out for help? What would we say of his hopes then?
It may be our generation’s greatest evil. The world is full of acolytes and pharisees, and adherents of countless religions and dogmas, and each day a hundred or so thousand of them find out they were dead wrong, yet we think, “Well, at least they had hope.”
Is not false hope great evil? Are we not acting the third brother in praising hope and belief wholesale, teaching those around us to believe that the burning house has a thousand exits?
Recycle from a desire to steward the earth, but do you hope by this save to the earth from catastrophe? Vote for what you believe will aid the common good, but will you hope in this to end poverty?
Every human being on this earth will be dead in a short one-hundred and twenty years. What greater impoverishment is there than this? What greater catastrophe?
The moral candidate, the better job, the recovered economy, do not these hopes distract us from the flames? Have they so blinded us to the world dying and full of decay?
What did the Jewish nation hope in? The scriptures. The very word of God! Yet Jesus tells us not even this was hope enough:
You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.
False hope is no hope at all. We must turn and ask the eldest for help. All else is delusion, lies, and great evil, and in this evil our brothers and we ourselves are consumed.
• • •
The Legend of Zelda introduced a technology so precious, they coated it’s cartridge in gold: The Save.
Up until The Save was introduced, Game Over meant Game Over — You Lose, It’s Done, Have A Box of Kleenex. But in Zelda, we experienced salvation. We fought and were slaughtered, yes, but then, as Norse Warriors in the halls of Valhalla, we rose to fight again.
Before Zelda, other games tried to get around the lack of a “save” feature. Mega-Man had this annoying grid that you would put the code into (my brother and I made a book of grid paper to keep track of our codes). Castlevania II made you enter a password Tolstoyan in length.
Another game that used a password was Metroid. But there was a problem: in Metroid if you entered the password to start the game where you left off, none of your life points or missles would come back with you.
Let me put this in perspective. By the end of the game, one may collect up to 699 life points and 255 missiles. To obtain said life points and missiles, one has to wait for an alien to appear, kill it, and hope that it leaves something behind. Life points come in an increment of five, and missles in an increment of two. Getting to 699 and 255 took an eternity.
Toward the end of game, the player encounters the game’s namesakes, Metroids. To this day I am convinced that Metroids were invented by the Japanese military to weaken America by driving her youth to suicide. It took a single attack by a Metroid to finish me. I remember watching, helpless, as all my working, hours and hours on end was mercilessly brought to naught.
What shall we say of false hope on that day, facing our friends and loved ones, facing those whom in life failed to warn, thinking, “I don’t want to make them feel bad.” Will we not be brought to account for our silence?
Richard Sibbes writes in The Bruised Reed, “Those whom we suffer to be betrayed by their worst enemies, their sins, will have just cause to curse us another day.”
• • •
Jesus told his disciples:
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”[5]
At one point Jesus encounters with a group of people mourning a tragedy, and says,
“Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem?
No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”[6]
The assertion of scripture is this: despair is better than false hope. Save up, store up, be moral, read scripture, vote, believe in whatever with all your heart to the end of your days. Unless the thing or person you hope in can actually save, your hope will perish with you.
Despair can be a wonderful thing. Hitler would have been better off chasing a meth habit. His hope proved infinitely more damnable than any sadness he could have had.
Better a moth in darkness than drawing near to the flame.
O man, you will not repeat this life!
It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment,[7]
Do you truly desire to end your days in a delusion? Are you sure what you hope in is true? Or would it be better to embrace despair, so that at least you may cry out for help?
Or have you not heard?
“An hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.”
O, let we who yearn and mourn draw near! Let we who despair of torn garments and vague promises rejoice! Let us cry out with loud voice when all seems but lost, hoping against hope, and he will save. Very soon all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out,
Those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.
QUESTIONS FOR GOSPEL COMMUNITIES
All Gospel Communities currently discussing basic Christian doctrine through Two Cities.
QUESTIONS FOR CORDS
1. Who are you unwilling to speak the gospel to? Are you content to leave your friends in false hope?
2. What false hopes regarding work, comfort, and relationships are you entertaining? Do you know how to fight those false hopes?
3. Spend some time praying for courage and wisdom in your pursuit of true hope.
[1] From the chapter, “The Ethics of Elfland”
[2] N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1992), 181.
[3] N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2003), 146.
[4] See, for instance, John 8:44-47; Matthew 23
[5] Luke 14:26
[6] Luke 13:4-5
[7] Hebrews 9:27