Last week we were challenged to consider what it means to be alive. We probably don’t think about it much on a day to day basis, but what it is to be alive is not as obvious as we might expect. My mother spent the last years of her life unable to communicate and without any apparent awareness of anything around her. She was alive, but certainly not in the same way as when she was 40, or 60, or 10. A child in the womb is alive but not in the same way as after birth, or when 6 months old, or 3 years.
Being alive is not as clear-cut as we might think. The challenge is even clearer if we consider other parts of God’s creation. We would all consider our dog to be alive, but a mosquito, or the bacterium in our gut? The more they investigate, biologists have realized there is no simple or obvious test for what we can consider “alive”, or not.
We might be disconcerted by this, or it might help us get a little more comfortable with the fact that being “alive in God” is not so easy to get our heads around. I imagine God might sometimes feel our need to understand a little like the parent of the two-year old faced with their perpetual “why?… why?… why?…” – and forced in the end to say in exasperation “that’s just the way it is!”
Today our challenge is similar but maybe even more difficult. Jesus says (Lk 21:5-19) to those who face persecution and death “not a hair on your head will be destroyed”. But how can that be? He has just said “they will put some of you to death”. You can be killed, but not a hair on your head will be destroyed? That doesn’t make sense!
It may be easier to find a perspective in which we can make sense of this if we consider another aspect of early Christian belief. Those people who were being persecuted and killed were happy about it. They saw it as a privilege. One of the things that puzzled and sometimes infuriated non-Christians was the willingness of these people to die for their beliefs. We saw the same in the reading from Maccabees last week.
So the perspective on life and death that we considered last week is also connected to how we think about suffering. Yes we may suffer and we will certainly die, but that does not affect our relationship with God. God loves everything about us, down to each individual hair on our head. He does not allow anything to be destroyed, we remain complete and perfect for him – just as my mother did, regardless of how she might have appeared to us.
Jesus tells us it’s not how things appear to us that matters, but how they appear to God.