The Triumph of the Cross – September 14, 2003

            In Aldous Huxley’s rather famous book, Brave New World, there’s a scene, when I read it years ago, that left a big impression on me.  This scene occurs in a kind of hospital ward for the dying, and in this “brave new world,” children are made to play in the very room where other people are dying.  Death is treated as just another ordinary occurrence.  So these children noisily burst into the hospital ward where the Savage (the one character who just does not fit into the brave new world) is visiting a dying woman who is his friend.  Amidst the clamor of the playing children, this woman dies, and Savage, heart-stricken, falls across the bed, weeping and calling out to God in his grief.  The nurse becomes quite upset at what is considered very bad behavior, behavior that might disrupt the children’s death-conditioning.  Huxley describes her reaction – “Should she speak to him? try to bring him back to a sense of decency? remind him of where he was? of what fatal mischief he might do to these poor innocents? Undoing all their wholesome death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry–as though death were something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as all that! It might give them the most disastrous ideas about the subject, might upset them into reacting in the entirely wrong, the utterly anti-social way.”

            Ah, the brave new world, so accurately predicted by Huxley many decades ago, a world so brave, so really courageous, that it fears not even death.  Or, rather – and this is far worse – a world so brave it holds that death is without significance, as the nurse in this scene thinks to herself, while witnessing the Savage’s grief, “as though death were something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as all that!” 

            That’s the brave new world, a religion-less world, and godless.  Religion-less and godless for good reason.  Because in the brave new world the human being matters very little; his or her value is in function and productivity only, ultimately.  But religion – Christianity especially – assumes something very special about the human person:  that man and woman are significant.  We reason, explore, design and make things – sometimes just for the heck of it (we call that art); we joke and laugh; we surround ourselves with ceremony; we love and hate; we praise virtue and sometimes do evil; we worship and feel ourselves accountable to some divine authority; we mourn and weep; and in the end we die.  And religion says that all of this is most significant. 

            The existence of religion, in fact, can be said, on the natural level, to be due to the fact that the human person faces death.  Religion is man’s attempt to deal with death in a meaningful and even hopeful way.  Study almost any religion, and you’ll discover its chief concern is in coming to terms with death, it’s pondering the possibility of an afterlife, and it’s detailing how to attain to that life.   Religion takes death very seriously.

            But the brave new world does not.  Death has become simply a means of solving a problem – whether the problem is an unwanted, unborn child (or even, and this is next on the docket and already being advocated by Ivy League ethicists:  death as a means of parents rejecting their new born who is just not quite what they were shopping for) – or whether the problem is the elderly (and so-called “non-productive”), the terminally ill, the urban massed populations of a nation’s enemy in war, and so forth.  Welcome to the “culture of death,” as Pope John Paul II has so accurately labeled it.  And it all boils down to the brave new world’s view of the human being – that he or she is no longer as a human being really that significant. So then, neither is death.

            Religion has always known better, even if ancient religions could not give a satisfactory answer to the mystery of death nor engender much hope in the hearts of many people.  It is fascinating – and rather moving – to study the history of religions, to see in peoples of centuries, even millennia ago the same longing for meaning in relation to the God (or gods) who is behind all of reality.  Even if, as Plato remarked – even if we are simply the playthings of the gods, still even then we take comfort in the assurance that at least the gods deign us worthy of play.  But even deeper into the different cults and religions of the past, one finally comes across the most mysterious of all the stories of mythology – the story, told as myth, found in many cultures, of a god who not only cares for the world, for men, but who suffers for them, dies for them and rises again to bring them the life and hope they long for:  somehow, someway, a triumph over death.

            What is so beautifully hinted at in ancient stories or myths though (and here is where things get really interesting and a bit daunting) – all of these stories point to, foreshadow, something that actually took place in time and space, in history, on this little planet called earth, some two thousand years ago.  What were delicately woven stories of longing in the dim past, all of sudden, yet quietly, broke into history when a young maiden said “yes” to God and a baby was born in Bethlehem. 

            And so here’s how significant we are (a significance due to God’s will and creative work, not to what we have done):  that God has deigned to most intimately share in our very human nature by becoming a man and living among us.  Our Creator, who made us in His image – and thus our yearning for meaningfulness – has entered into His creation, into our world, and has raised our nature to unimaginable heights by uniting forever the human to the divine in the Person of Jesus Christ.  The peoples of ancient times could only hope in some dim way that the gods had some concern for their well-being.  How amazed they would be by the Christian message:  that “yes, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son….” 

            As a man, as one sharing in our nature, then, He could enter into all things human, even into our dreaded experience of death.  And as God, by going through all this, He could – and did – transform it.  When God in Christ dies upon the Cross, death is not the victor; it is death itself that is changed, made significant and transformed into the very portal to new and everlasting life that Christ rose from the dead to give us.  This is the triumph of the Cross that blesses every Christian with meaning in this life, our pilgrimage to Eternity, to God.  The Triumph of the Cross is the victory that has made even human death (the result of sin) now meaningful.  The Triumph of the Cross will make our own deaths (if we follow Christ) into the occasion of our final commitment of ourselves into the hands of God, who made us, who loved us so much that He came among us in Jesus Christ. 

            The brave new world is really not so brave after all.  It refuses to face the burden of human significance – that each of us, every human being – really matters, matters to God.  For God loves us.  Thus the creation, the existence of all that is; thus the incarnation, the whole historical reality of Christmas; thus all the words of Christ to teach us, His life to inspire us; and thus the Cross, the death agony of Christ to deliver us from sin and death – the Triumph of the Cross.