a call to holy hatred

hate as the proper response to the resurrection of Jesus

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

“The last enemy to be defeated is death…” (1 Corinthians 15v26)

On a late Monday morning in June of 2022, I received a FaceTime call from my mother. On the other end of the line was my mom with some other family members all surrounding the hospital bed of my grandmother, the hospital bed where she would draw her last breaths mere hours later.

My grandmother was 91 years old. She had lived such a rich life and was surrounded by people who adored her. She had seen all of her children have happy marriages, seen them have kids who grew up to be adults, and seen many of those grandchildren have kids of their own. She was the embodiment of Proverbs 31 and Psalm 128.

And she loved Jesus. The last years of her life saw a few of her grown-up children join her at church every Sunday.

By every metric that matters, my grandmother Elizabeth Anne Graham, lived a full and blessed life. And her death would be a mere footnote, more insignificant than a teardrop on the scale of the ocean. She would breathe her last and in that same moment would breathe in the air of heaven. I knew that, when the phone rang. I wanted to say thank you, I wanted to say how much of a gift that she had been to me personally and that her presence and prayer life had been to the family that I now call my own.

But still I was so, so sad.

I said most of what I wanted to say but at the end of the call, I tried to read Psalm 91 over her.

You who live in the shelter of the Most High,
    who abide in the shadow of the Almighty,
will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress;
    my God, in whom I trust.”

I got two verses in before the sadness overwhelmed me… Our oldest daughter, so loving and so observant was watching me falter. She picked up the Bible and continued on ending with…

Those who love me, I will deliver;
I will protect those who know my name.
When they call to me, I will answer them;
I will be with them in trouble;
I will rescue them and honor them.
With long life I will satisfy them
and show them my salvation.

It was such a beautiful, sad moment to share with our daughter. And it was so poignant to feel my own recoiling at the loss of this woman, even though I knew she was on the threshold of a glory that I cannot begin to imagine. And yet still.

It’s ok to hate death.

For the Christian, death gets mixed up with all of the most stunning promises of God so we can sometimes intuit mixed messages about death. If death is a doorway to eternal glory and bliss, we easily think, then surely death is ok, perhaps even good. But, be that as it may, the scriptures never make a truce with death or any of its friends.

Our is, after all, a religion of salvation. Or faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptiness and waste of the death, the forces—whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance—that shatter living souls; and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred.

David Bentley Hart, The Doors Of The Sea

Jesus is overcome with a deep well of anger at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, tears pouring like fountain from his eyes because he hates death and he hates that his friend died.

Jesus does not stoically stare down the specter of his own death. Unlike Socrates calmly drinking hemlock, Jesus agonizes over the cup that will be his in death in the garden of Gethsemane.

But Jesus in entrusting himself to God in death, in commending his Spirit to God, takes the great enemy of God and refashions it for his own good purposes. The cry of “it is finished” on the cross is a far cry from the notion that God needs death. He doesn’t. But death, working in concert with sin and the demonic is the foreign territory where his beloved creation is enslaved and so, God goes to that far country. Jesus truly makes everything, even death, work together for the good of those who love him.

Jesus in taking on the God-forsakenness of death fills death with his very life. Nobody dies alone because Jesus has gone down into death. His body and blood performing the irreversible alchemy of turning the grave into a gateway.

By removing the sting of sin from death, by abolishing death as a spiritual reality, by filling it with Himself, with His love and life. He makes death—which was the very reality of separation and corruption of life—into a shining and joyful passage—passover—into fuller life, fuller communion, fuller love…

-Alexander Schmemann

Or Karl Rahner says it this way:

Christ has accepted death. Therefore this must be more than merely a descent into empty meaninglessness. He has accepted the state of being forsaken. Therefore the overpowering sense of loneliness must still contain hidden within itself the promise of God’s blessed nearness. He has accepted total failure. Therefore defeat can be a victory. He has accepted abandonment by God. Therefore God is near even when we believe ourselves to have been abandoned by him. He has accepted all things. Therefore all things are redeemed.

-Karl Rahner

Christ has mortally wounded death. But 1 Corinthians 15 tells us that we still we still experience it’s sting—the sting of the empty chair around the Easter table, the sting of the child that we never got to see grow up, the sting of millions suffering and dying caught in the crossfire of warfare and famine. The venom of that wound will only be remedied fully when everything is put under Christ’s feet when the perishable is clothed in the imperishable. Then we shall stand on the shores like the Israelites still sodden with clay from the deep of the Red Sea, “Horse and rider have been cast into the sea” or “Where oh death is your victory, where oh death is your sting?”

In the meantime, death is not our friend nor is to be feared. Because Jesus is near to all the dying. He is the good shepherd in the valley of the shadow of death. Jesus has muzzled death forever, defanging it by his life, death, and resurrection. He prepares a table for us in the presence of the great enemy. His body broken for us, his blood shed for us.

Death is nothing to fear, because it is nothing but a way opened, like a wound, into the Son’s uncreated intimacy with God by his own wounded flesh (Heb. 10:19-20)

-Chris Green, All Things Beautiful

This is the story of Easter. That by the love of God we see that which we are truly called to hate. We find that we do not hate the face of another in vengeance and violence, or the face in the mirror in shame and regret. Rather, we join with God in hating all that mars the goodness of God’s creation through desolation, decay, and distortion. Jesus unmasks our true enemy, judges it, liberates us from its clutches, and sets us free to bring the certainty of God’s eternal future into the present that is passing away.

God comes into the midst of evil and death, to judge the evil in the world—and in us. And while he judges us, he loves us, he purifies us, he saves us, and he comes to us with gifts of grace and love. He makes us happy as only children know. He is, and always will be now, with us in our sin, in our suffering, and at our death. We are no longer alone. God is with us and we are longer homeless. A piece of the eternal home is grafted into us.

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It is the life thing in us
that will not let us die.
even in death’s hand
we fold the fingers up
and call them greens and
grow on them- Lucille Clifton

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me….
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die. - John Donne

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
And he will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the covering that is spread over all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the Lord has spoken.
It will be said on that day,
“See, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us.
This is the Lord for whom we have waited;
let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”
For the hand of the Lord will rest on this mountain.

-Isaiah 25vv6-10

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Will pick up the rest of the newsletter features in that holy pastoral time we call “after Easter.” Until then I pray God’s richest mercy would be revealed to you during this upcoming Holy Week. He loves you. He gave himself for you. He is with you.

Thank you for reading, it truly means the world to me and I pray that some small sliver of something I’ve said about Jesus would be a blessing to you.

Grace+peace to you- Ian