Joe O’Leary: How John led us through Lent

In Lent, it is needful to address the phenomenon of Death. Chapter 11 of John’s Gospel is perhaps the most sustained meditation on Death in the New Testament, and it turns out to be a very encouraging one. The long gospels from John that have guided us through the season – the Samaritan woman (ch. 4), the blind man (ch. 9), and Lazarus (ch. 11)– might all be suited for group recitation like the Passion.

The raising of Lazarus is the last of the “signs” that are a feature of the first half of the Gospel and that are usually marked by a revelation of an aspect of Jesus’s being, which is received in a confession of faith. (Most recently, we have “I am the resurrection and the life” and Martha’s response: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.)”

Each of the Gospels and each of the Passion narratives has its own particular climate. Mark is sudden, enigmatic, bedrock; Matthew presents the new Law from Jesus as the new Moses, founding a new community; his passion story intensifies the themes of temptation and betrayal—dramatizing Judas’s remorse and despair, Pilate’s uneasy conscience—his wife’s warning and his unforgettable gesture of washing his hands; all betray Jesus and the hearers are prodded to repent; Luke presents Jesus as a gentle martyr, “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me”; “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”; “This day you will be with me in paradise”; “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”; the climate of John may be called sublime, and in the Passion Jesus is calm, entirely in charge, sovereign. The unpleasantness of death is transferred to the Lazarus story and Jesus’s death is his being “lifted up from the earth” and entering into his glory.

Some claim that John’s Gospel, “the spiritual gospel” as Clement of Alexandria called it, presents a Jesus who is a god walking around in disguise with no fleshly reality. But the very core of the Gospel is the declaration that “the Word became flesh” and all the references to Jesus’s flesh carry maximum impact, e.g. when he sits fatigued at the well (“quaerens me sedisti lassus”), when he uses his spittle to heal the blind man, and when he weeps, sharing the grief of Lazarus’s sisters. He enters deeply into human experience and invites us to enter into his experience as the Son of God. He speaks of “my Father and your Father, my God and your God” (20:17). When he says, “I came from the Father and have come into the world; again I am leaving the world and am going to the Father”(16:28), he is catching us up into the movement of his life, with death as return to the Father.

I listened to a lecture on what carers report about the last moments of life, and I found it encouraging, if even half of it is true. (What Really Happens When You Die | Peter Fenwick’s Studies of End-of-Life-Phenomena.) This area is a happy hunting ground for all sorts of spiritualists, such as W. B. Yeats, and even when reinforced by the authority of the Dalai Lama, one is slow to take as “gospel” its accounts of how the dying are visited by benign spirits, such as those of their parents, to help them make the transition to the new mode of being. A condition of making the transition serenely is to let everything go, to let one’s ego go as one unites with the cosmos (are we ready to do that?). These experiences are real, as psychological events, and can allow death to be lived as a peaceful homecoming. 

You may think that old people think a lot about death, but often the primary worry people have about aging lies elsewhere. Fear of abandonment, of not having time to get one’s work finished, of grim prospects of physical and mental health, or of having missed out on crucial life experiences, can predominate over the intangibilities of death. (People emerging from “near-death experiences” report two imperatives: to learn and to love.) Rousseau has an interesting remark: “The study of an old man, if he still has any to do, is uniquely to learn to die, and this is precisely what one does least at my age; one thinks of everything except that. All old men hold on to life more than children and leave it with less good grace than young people.” Old people do not like to be reminded of death (even on their deathbed) and think it rude to be reminded that their time is running out. Yet the body itself prepares us to die.

If we are lucky enough to get through the “asteroid zone” of the seventies when anything can hit us, luckily escaping accident or disease, in the eighties the processes of a physiological winding down take over. Adjusting to this as a dispensation of Providence, the wise learn to greet death as a friend when it comes at last. “Life is changed, not taken away,” the church tells us. It is not a philosophical maxim, but an expression of faith in the Risen Christ, who in his life, mission, passion, and resurrection maps out luminously all the stages of our path, a map lighted up in contemplative depth in the Gospel of John. 

After Easter we will be hearing much more of John, especially the discourses placed at the Last Supper, and we will realize more concretely that “the spiritual gospel” does not mean something vague but rather the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit, leading us into the full truth about life and death.