Eternal Life

John 6:27-40

Don’t work for the food which passes away but for the food that stays on into eternal life..

Everyone the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will certainly not turn away.  For I have come down from heaven to do not my own will but the will of the One who sent me. And this is the will of the One who sent me: that I should not lose any of all those he has given me but should raise them up on the Last Day. Yes, this is the will of my Father: that all who see the Son and trust in him should have eternal life, and that I should raise them up on the Last Day.

Suddenly the meaning of this familiar passage shifted in my mind—

What if Jesus was talking about his Last Day?  What if “raise them up” meant raising us up on the cross with him? That idea makes trust the central focus of the entirety of the Good News! It’s not just our trust in Christ, but Christ’s trust in us, and in God; culminating in God’s trust in all of us.

Imagine what it would be like to not only trust God enough to go willingly to a shameful death, but also to trust that the only way to “not lose any of all those he has given me” would be to include them in the dying?

It’s near the end of Lent, and it makes so much sense to me, to think that “all who see the Son and trust in him should have eternal life, and that I should raise them up on the Last Day,” means exactly that. Every other quote about dying with Christ — like this one— “If anyone wants to come after me, let him say ‘No’ to himself, take up his execution-stake, and keep following me. For whoever wants to save his own life will destroy it, but whoever destroys his life for my sake and for the sake of the Good News will save it,”  suddenly makes a whole different kind of sense.

What if it was suffering itself that God intended to redeem?

What if there is only one Way to bring us to freedom, love, and hope, and that is for us to go open-eyed into misery and death with Christ?

What if we are being raised up to shame, despair, and death through our own trust?

What if eternal life is exactly that Trust?

What if we are being called into trust; the same trust that led to Christ’s willing death?

What if it’s not some kind of quid pro quo; not a negotiation; not a temporary setback with a final payoff?

What if the whole truth that leads to freedom in God’s Realm, is only this— to give up everything?

All of these questions have led me to remember a conversation I had about death with a friend of mine. She was wondering aloud about whether there was really life after death, and I asked her this question: “Are you alive right now?” She said, “Yes,” and then I asked her this— “And has there ever been, in all of time, a moment that was not ‘Right Now’? She said, “No,”  

and so I said —   “Well then, how could you possibly die?”