John 6. 35,41-51
We take at home a BBC journal called Science Focus. In a recent issue we learned that Dr Ming Xu, at the University of Connecticut’s Centre on Ageing, has found a cocktail of two drugs that kills senescent cells in elderly mice, that is, cells that bring about ageing. These drugs have been found to give the mice a more robust constitution and can prevent or ease all sorts of cancers and other diseases, as well as helping them live longer. It’s the equivalent of human beings in their 70s and 80s having their lives extended by five or six years. And, what is more, these drugs are safe for human consumption.
So how about it? If this were on offer for, say, a ten years’ life extension, would you accept it? And if the offer were for a 50 or 60 years’ life extension, would you still accept it? And if the offer were for repeat doses, so that you could live for ever, would you accept that? I don’t know if we would, would we? Apart from anything else, where would we put all the people who decided to live for ever? On the moon? On Mars?
Now, here’s a little adventure into time. Time past, that is. Some years ago, I visited the cave at Font-de-Gaume in the Dordogne region of France. Visits are now very limited, because the polychrome cave paintings there are so vulnerable, but there was little restriction when I visited. The paintings are mostly of bison, horses, mammoths and other animals, and date from around 17,000 years BC. I found it absolutely stunning to stand in front of these magnificent paintings, still rich in detail and colour and dating from so long ago. It put things into a new perspective, even the antiquity of our Christian religion and its Hebrew heritage. But how life and the world have changed in the 19,000 years from then till now, and how much more in the 300 million years since life first evolved on earth.
Yet, Jesus, according to St John’s Gospel, offered the people life for ever. ‘Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever’ he said. His discussion with bystanders all started with the feeding of the 5,000. When people heard about the ‘bread of God which comes down from heaven and give life to the world’, they wanted a piece of it, and Jesus explained: ‘I am the bread of life’, and ‘whoever believes has eternal life’.
Maybe there’s a clue here. If you’re not so sure about wanting to live for ever, perhaps there’s a helpful clue. Eternal life isn’t the same thing as everlasting life. Everlasting life is just that, everlasting, almost, we could add, interminable. But eternal life is timeless, something not subject to the limitations and ravages of time, an experience that can start at any time at all, characterised at its best by experiences of truth, beauty and goodness without limit. What we might couch otherwise as the fullest experience of being with God here and now, and, as the word implies, for all eternity.
In fact, there’s a commodity that we haven’t yet considered. And that commodity is love. There’s a love poem in our Old Testament called The Song of Solomon. It contains this verse:
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
This is love between two people, of course. But if this love is strong as death, what more might that be true of other kinds of love?
Are you familiar with Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘An Arundel Tomb’? It describes a lovely tomb in Chichester Cathedral with effigies of a knight and his lady, thought to be Richard FitzAlan, 10th Earl of Arundel and his second wife, Eleanor of Lancaster. It’s from the 14th century, when they died, and was originally in Lewes Priory. What is distinctive is that the knight’s right-hand gauntlet is removed, and in his hand he tenderly holds his wife’s right hand. Larkin finishes his delightful poem thus:
. . . The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
We’re still in the realm of love between two people: marital love in this case. But there’s plenty of evidence in the Bible for such love representing the divine love. Love, that is, between God and God’s people, and therefore love between God’s people as well. Indeed, God’s love is intended to be even wider than that between God’s people, because the command to the Jews, reiterated by Jesus, was to love our neighbours as ourselves. And we know from Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan how widely-embracing that love of neighbour was to extend.
‘What will survive of us is love’, Philip Larkin wrote. This is our timeless contribution to the world. Every element of love, however tiny and whether of kindness, generosity, forgiveness . . . every element of kindness becomes part of the great accumulation of love in the world. ‘Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever’, Jesus promised. Whoever shares in his life will live for ever, not visibly or tangibly, but as part of the timeless accumulation of love that is handed on from generation to generation. It may sound fanciful, but the love shown between the French cave painters of 17,000 years BC will have come down to us by this most subtle process of osmosis over the generations.
So – do we want to live for ever? Perhaps Yes and No. Probably No on the basis of anti-ageing drugs keeping us going for ever as we are and filling the world to overflowing. But perhaps Yes on the basis that Jesus intended.
Jesus, he said, is himself the ‘bread of God which comes down from heaven and give life to the world’. And ‘whoever believes has eternal life’. By identifying with Jesus, we share in his life-giving, which is the sharing of love. Even our littlest of contributions count, and count alongside the self-giving love Jesus. And that, I reckon, is how we live for ever, maybe ourselves forgotten with the passage of time, but continuing to live for ever by our invisible contributions to the accumulated mass of love in the world. And held beyond time in the real, but incomprehensible, love of God.
May we be caught up in that love.