Chapter 5
The Road Home
Christians still die. You and I will still die. After all, Adam’s road—our road—hasn’t changed. It still leads to the threshold of death and into that yawning cave. But Jesus’s victory over death shattered its power. Our road may be unchanged but it doesn’t end in death anymore. The road goes into the crucible of unmaking and then out the other side where we—like the resurrected Jesus—will be fundamentally transformed.
We do not need to fear death because death is no longer capable of holding humanity. Instead, in its defeat death has become a tool—a servant of our God that he uses to unmake and remake us into the people he wanted us to be in the first place. In death, our failing flesh and corrupted impulses melt in the crucible and God forges a new heart for us. One that listens and follows and directs a renewed body into life and love for our Creator.
Death is not the end, but a beginning. And the road that leads to death’s dark door is no longer a test of endurance, but a chance to begin the remaking process early.
We started this conversation about death by saying we often hope our Christian faith will make the road we walk easier—take the pain away or at least give the pain purpose. And, just because Jesus rendered death toothless, it still doesn’t change the fact that the road we walk every day of our lives still brings with it hurt. Long before we ever get to the end. Death feels like the final bit of pain at the end of a long series of hardships and sorrow.
For many of us, we look at suffering in life and death at the end as a necessary evils we must endure to get to heaven—a place that will, if not explain all the pain we suffered, at least compensate for it. Death is a release from the world we live in and a pathway to something…well, different. Our view of heaven is a warm thought, but it lacks weight. It sits in the mind like a toasted marshmallow—fluffy and sweet but missing real substance. That’s not to say heaven isn’t real, but that our understanding of it is off. We see heaven as a release from pain and suffering. But that’s not what it is. It’s a world more real and more solid—to borrow from C.S. Lewis—than we are capable of experiencing in our fallen state. We must be remade—and the road to death does just that.
Before his death, Jesus sat talking to his disciples and some people who had been following him. Just prior, Jesus had miraculously fed over nine thousand people combined in two different sittings, and many of the people following him did so because they were looking for something that would benefit them in the immediate present. Free food in the first century was just as compelling as it is today.
It’s those people that Jesus invited to draw close before saying something that challenged their very understanding of life, death, and what it meant to follow him.
Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:34–36)
Jesus knew where his road would lead. He knew he was living a reprise of Adam’s life, and he knew he was heading toward Adam’s final fate. And yet he invited those following him to join him on the road—willingly, knowingly walking into death. Jesus didn’t make much of the final fate of humanity in his call. Instead, he invited those who would follow him into a kind of living death. To carry a cross is to accept that death is a forgone conclusion. No one picked up a cross in the first century just for exercise. By the time the beam was on your shoulders, you were already dead—you just hadn’t done the dying yet. And yet that is exactly what Jesus invites his disciples into: A daily death that steadily marches toward the final end of life.
Life following Jesus is practice for death.
Christianity doesn’t take away our pain or even assign it little purposes for some unknown future. Christianity transforms the road that we walk—with all its scrapes and bruises and battered shins—into a refining forge that cuts away our impulse to serve only ourselves and replaces it with pieces of true humanity after the fashion of Jesus himself. He calls us to follow him and allow ourselves to die every day. To allow ourselves to be unmade.
All too often my attitude toward following Jesus says, “I will follow him and give up my own self–interests up to but not including getting cut off in traffic.” Or, “I’ll be generous with my money so long as I can still afford to take a trip to Cancun.” Or, “I’ll shovel snow for my elderly neighbor when he stops yelling at my kids.” My tolerance for self–denial is very low, and I fail at it every day. But that’s exactly what Jesus turned our road into: practice letting ourselves die.
When the first humans took the fruit that God forbade, they did so to seize control of their lives. In a great stroke of irony, they set their feet on a road to a place that would strip them completely of any and all control they might have gained. To this day, we fear death at the end of the road because it wrenches all control over our life from our hands. Rarely do we have ample warning before coming to death’s dark door. But the life of a Christian is practice for that moment. Dying a little each day every day, we grow used to the sensation of letting go of ourselves. Letting go of our control over our world.
As we follow Jesus on Adam’s road, we practice the surrender that Adam was meant to embrace from the beginning. Trusting that our Creator is not testing us, but remaking us. Trusting that, if we choose to loosen our white–knuckle grip on our possessions, our reputations, and our very lives, he will not abandon us. Trusting that we don’t need to be our own little gods, but that we can instead lean wholly on the one who promised us life. Adam’s rebellion corrupted that road, yes, but Jesus’s obedience transformed it.
Jesus told his disciples that those who wanted to save their lives should be the first to give them up. To surrender all their rights and wants and follow him into death. We can do that because he went before us. Jesus entered death’s cave and warred with the unmaking itself. But death could not prevail, and Jesus carved a way through death into life again.
Christianity, properly understood, is a way of dying.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve faced hardship in life. You’ve felt the sting of a friend’s angry words. You’ve had your immune system or muscles or bones betray you. You’ve held a parent’s hand as they slipped away into breathless sleep. I don’t have to tell you that this road we call life is hard. It’s full of pain. There are so many joys, too, but it’s the pain that haunts our minds after the sun has set and the moon hides behind the clouds.
The promise of the resurrection—the promise of Jesus stepping out of the tomb—is that we can embrace it all. This road we walk—the road Adam doomed us to—is not the end. The sorrow and the heartbreak—they teach us to die. We do not face death—the little ones or the big ones—alone. We have the crucified Savior by our side. He’s already walked the road. He went into the cave before us and carved a way through. Now he holds us by the hand and leads us into death so that he can bring us back out again. To deliver us into the sparkling sunlight of a remade life.
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