A "severe mercy"

It happens so often.  Someone goes in for a minor medical issue only to find they are terminal with cancer or some other major illness.  Someone who seemed in fine health is suddenly in hospice.  Treatment that we thought was working is suddenly no longer helping and disease is without cure.  We find ourselves so conflicted with death is a surprise and when the only life is the long wait for that death to come.  What do we do?  How do we respond?  Is it right to pray that death come quickly so those whom we love are spared suffering?  Or do we pray only for healing that we know must be a miracle?

C.S. Lewis called such a death that ends suffering “a severe mercy.”  It is mercy to relieve the suffering of their pain but no death is really a mercy.  C. S. Lewis has it about right.  It is a severe mercy.  There ought to be great comfort in the fact that God knows not only the weakness that causes our death but the suffering that accompanies that death.  Our Lord knows it not as spectator to our suffering but as the One whose suffering has borne the weight of all that sin and its death have inflicted upon creation.  When Scripture tells us that precious in the Lord's sight is the death of His saints, that is not a sentiment but a profound description of the love that is wounded with us, that suffers our suffering, and that has provided for an eternal release from suffering.  We ought to gain some comfort from this.

The answer to death is not the prolonging of the life that will still die.  The answer, of course, is to overcome death with the life that death can no more reach.  Our lives are hidden in Christ and the futures a mystery to us until we live them.  But our outcome is known.  We shall not die but live.  That is Job's witness.  Though this body be destroyed, we hope for more than a memory but a real life -- so real, indeed, that death itself dies and only the life we have in Christ remains.  Glorious flesh, a new heaven, a new earth, the grand reunion with the faithful who have gone before, and our gift of seeing God face to face are all part of that life we have in Christ.

But there are moments when we find ourselves somewhat in the position of the disciples -- between Good Friday and Easter.  We are waiting for the fullness of the promise to be seen and holding onto it by faith.  I find it amazing how some Christians can treat death as if it were no big deal.  I have heard people actually say that there were worse things in life than death.  Though some may try, I cannot smile my way through such loss.  Tears flow, hearts ache, and sorrows come -- not as the ignorant who have no hope but as the hopeful who yearn for the fullness of that hope to be realized.  Yet, sometimes, death is merciful, a severe mercy, permitted by God when disease and suffering threaten to swallow up the faithful whom we love and whom God loves.  In those moments, we are both sorrowful and comforted that God can love us in this deep and profound way.