Holy Week Monday - There's No Vaccine for This

There is no lack of uncomfortable subjects for conversation in 2021.  Vaccines, mask mandates, the last election…any of these can turn a polite communication into a dog fight in mach 2.  But if you really want to clear out a room, bring up that age old killer subject that makes the most loquacious of men suddenly mute and sends a natural born gossip hunting for the back door out.  

Death is the most inevitable, dependable, solid truth in each of our futures.  It’s not up for dispute, has no controversy to come up against, and cannot be foiled by great virtue, great intellect or great strength.  The bible calls it “the last enemy”, and indeed it is - completely undefeatable by all the powers of man.  It is as sure as day turning to night.  And it is the most off-limit topic of human discourse.

Lent is the great reminder, the bell ringing in the tower to sober up mankind to the brevity of life and the certainty of death.  In all the beautiful, horrible passion of holy week, there is no avoiding the ultimate truth.  Only One man defeated death.  And only He is its remedy. 

John Donne was an English poet who lived around the turning of the 16th century.  In those days before antibiotics and RNA vaccines, sickness would pass through a town and wipe out large swaths of a population swiftly.  Donne was lying on his bed, listening as the church bell rang out for each death, ring, ring, ring.  And it was there he penned the poem that included the famous line:

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

He survived that particular plague (and graced the world with works of profound and beautiful poetry).  But death did ultimately come to John Donne, as it will for you and me.

Here on the solemn ground of Holy Week, where we remember the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, perhaps a wise first step in our meditation should be to listen to the bells ourselves.  It is not morbid or brooding to consider daily the words of the brother of the Son of God, recorded for our good:

“For what is your life?  It is even a vapor that appeareth for a little time, then vanishes away.”

~ James 4:14

I squirm under this serious question that drives me to repent of the wasted time in my life, and to reorient my days toward the thing that really matters.  In this week especially, the bell tolls loud for the waking up of souls to the great reality that life is brief.  Ask not for whom the bell tolls, my friend, it tolls for thee.  And for me.

How much greater, then, the truth that sounds louder than any death nell. As we “proceed to the route” as GPS advises, we will find on Good Friday the hope that makes this short stretch meaningful and hopeful.  The bell tolled for Him - even though He was God.  His death bought us life.  Not a stingy 80 years of toil and trouble, but an everlasting spring in the Kingdom of Love.

Today, don’t avoid the reality of your mortality.  Let it sink in.  Let it drive you to the cross of Christ, for whom the bell tolled.

Your friend on the pilgrim road,

Loriann