On death and ecology

 

Death is the precursor to life. I exist, because my father’s DNA and my mother’s DNA tore themselves apart, disembowelled from top to bottom, and instead cleaved to the other. John’s account of Jesus coming into the world notes, ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.’ (John 1:5) Darkness first, then, ‘Let there be light.’ Darkness, not overcoming light, but from whence light shines. Death does not bring Life to an end, but ushers life in.

There was a time when the whole earth was barren, save for a garden, planted by God. There, the rain fell, dying and being laid to rest in the ground; to be drawn up by the roots and trunks of trees. There, the leaves fell, decaying into the soil, making it ever more fertile. Death is the precursor to life. (I have proposed, elsewhere, that the Garden is a metaphor for the Babylonian exile, and the barren earth for the abandoned territory of Judah. This theme carries through exile, through invasion, through siege and destruction, through the re-emergence of remnant communities over again.)

When Adam and Eve are driven out from the garden, this is not an ontological change in human nature—we have always had the capacity for good or evil; and always had the gift of death and life, neither of which can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus—but an ecological change for the wider creation. Our experience of death—our experience of death; death already existed, as fossil records and coal seams testify—and therefore also our experience of life—is no longer cradled in the garden, but spreads through the whole world: first, death; then life, as promised. Our creaturely labour enables all creation to die, and die well—including dying to self, and to sin, which is to put ourselves first and against our neighbour—in order that it may be taken up into the grace of perpetually renewing life, ‘For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ (Romans 6:23)

He is the light that shines in the darkness. He is the branch, because he is the root, the one who, having been lifted-up in death, lifts us up with him in life. He is the tree of life, and the tree from which his own cross is hewn (hence Nordic mythology, written down in the thirteenth century, and which paganises Christianity, depicts Odin hanging himself from the sacred tree Yggdrasil to gain wisdom and power). He is the seed buried in the soil, dying to produce fruit a hundred-fold. We die, not because we have fallen from grace, but because we are created to represent the One who from eternity has laid their life down, that life might flow to others. We rise again, only in and with and by him. The whole earth is filled with his suffering and his glory. The made-new earth will not banish the death that births life, only Death as a foreboding cipher for estrangement from God and neighbour.

What might this mean for the mission of God on which we are sent out among our neighbours?

What does the reign of God in this suffering, glorious Christ Jesus look like in our neighbourhood?

What are the implications for creation care—one of the marks of mission—that does not empty the earth of her natural resources with insatiable hunger, but does enable that quality of dying that will usher in new life?