Rev. Dr Peter Walker | Principal of UTC Your Christian faith is a faith for life and death. By that I do not mean ‘life and death’ as in ‘the stakes are high’. Rather, Christianity is a faith for life and death because these two ultimate realities are held together by One who has greater authority than either of them. Life and death are both under the command of the One who has greater power over them than they will ever have over you. This does not mean we pretend death isn’t frightening. It is. Yet, even in the face of that sometimes frightening prospect, we are liberated by the knowledge that death has its place. Death exists, with life, under the dominion of God. Dietrich Bonhoeffer speaks of death in his poem Stations on the Road to Freedom:
Death Come now, highest feast on the way to everlasting freedom, death. Lay waste to the burdens of chains and walls which confine our earthly bodies and blinded souls, that we may see at last what here we could not see. Freedom, we sought you long in discipline, action, and suffering. Dying, we recognize you now in the face of God. We might well think that these words could easily be said from a place of comfort, but not so easily when faced by the prospect of death. Yet we recall that Bonhoeffer wrote those lines while confined in a Nazi prison camp, nearing his execution. How extraordinary was his faith, which allowed him to address death in that situation as the ‘highest feast on the way to everlasting freedom’.
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