Yes, thou art gone! and round me too the night
In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade.
I see her veil draw soft across the day,
I feel her slowly chilling breath invade
The cheek grown thin, the brown hair sprent with grey;
I feel her finger light
Laid pausefully upon life’s headlong train;
The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew,
The heart less bounding at emotion new,
And hope, once crush’d, less quick to spring again.
– Thyrsis, Matthew Arnold

Hope is the one motive strong enough to compel us to keep going long after strategy, skill and positioning have failed us once again; but it also consistently seems a thought too frail to take the brunt of reason’s careful scrutiny. The questions I ask in rapid succession of myself: “Where does this idea come from? Who cares for me that much? Will they not also let me down, just like all the rest?” all mount up in an unanswerable tumult of the same kind of chaos that convince me that day of the truth of hopelessness.

Today at Holy Cross we explored together the vanity of that hopelessness, trying to understand why it is that we allow the bitter twist of disappointment to be the defining aspect of our lives, ironically elevating it to the position of ultimate importance as we build fortresses of relational distance to insulate ourselves forever from its reach. Shaping our existential bricks and baking them thoroughly, we construct a tower that will reach up to the heavens in its eternal defiance of our own limitations – that is, of our very humanness.

Yes, it is an aspiration which has occurred to many before us, and in that very realization is to be found its futility. Was not the entire universe designed for humankind to inhabit and steward? Were any external bounds placed upon Adam and Eve in the garden, but rather only internal ones? There was no galaxy or planet forbidden to them, but God did say “Of this tree you shall not eat,” and in the humility of that stricture was revealed the point upon which our futures would rise or fall. Insofar as we were willing to accept our position of inherent need, there was no limit to the magnificence we could have known.

That hope, then, is indeed a false one. The dust of which we were fashioned is now the indicator of human greatness. How do we recognize the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, if not by their crumbling facades? The imprint of their civilizations has been made, but the only way we know it is by the testament of the merciless progression of time, and by the light finger of death laid upon all the hopes and dreams of the people who called them home.

Here is the source of all our fears and hopelessness – or, at least, of mine. Death is the great leveler of brilliance, opportunity and achievement. It does not matter how much in life I lay hold of and pile around me to protect myself from disappointment, for it all withers away before a grim messenger who requires from me an accounting for a life of betrayal and malice. Death is the unmistakable token of a holy God who will not countenance our undoing of a good world, our dismantling of a peaceful and growing community to reconstruct it into a warring collection of vindictive city-states determined to pull each other down into the relational morass of ultimate selfishness. And yet in its final irony, the greatest bitterness of our mortality is that we find ourselves finally and inescapably alone. God does sometimes give people what they want.

But that is not what he wants. And his desire was not simply intention. When God determined in the garden that it was not good for man to be alone, in that moment was put into words an inexorable principle that would define for all eternity the heart of God toward his Creation. Death had to be a component of betrayal, just as pain is a component of wrongdoing. But a God who was willing to create us in his image, stooping to put immortal breath into mortal bodies, was also willing to make a new Image into which we would be fashioned – so that we could live together with him again. Jesus was willing to take on flesh and live as a mortal man, to suffer wrong without redress, to put his hands on uncleanness to bring about wholeness, to pour into his friends even though they did not understand what he was doing, to have his human hopes crushed by a Father who turned his face aside at the final hour, and to at last offer up the greatest example of love this world has ever seen. He was willing to take death with all its terrifying hopelessness onto himself, so that those he loved could take our first breath of the new humanity in a world built on the hope of an indestructible life.

The power of death is not to be denied, that veil that is truly spread over all nations. In ever-nearing circle she weaves her shade over each one of us to softly tell the truth about how deep our betrayals really do go; and all of us have felt it, to our despair. It requires One who has gone through the valley of that shadow and who has laid a table of fellowship for us on the other side, to promise us a hope that can bear the weight of reason (to borrow Rick’s phrase) and of any other scales we care to test it on. He alone can give us something in which to hope, and in that hope I will live and die.

JV

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Author: Jeremy Vogan

My name is Jeremy Vogan. I live in Staunton, VA with my wife and four kids. I love to write, and seek to honestly explore the intellectual and emotional implications of following Jesus as a deeply broken person in a twisted, cruel world that is full of veiled beauty and meaning. Writing is part of how I faithfully look for Jesus Christ to someday make all things new. I'd enjoy hearing your feedback! JV