Naturally speaking, “human” is “being toward death.”  We don’t think about it that much; but we share this with all the plants and animals.  The “way of all flesh” is the path toward death. 

It’s not strange that we hate death.  It’s the underlying reason we spend so much money on health care.  Instinctively we seek to lengthen our lives, to secure our well-being, to insure what it takes to keep the doctor and the pharmacist paid.  Although we know that death is unavoidable, we also know that death is not what we are made for.  We know it instinctively.  So,     we try to find the balance between “what it takes” economically speaking; and “what we can afford to spend” so that we have the resources to rely on when we get sick. 

What is not so plain to see, immediately, is that our life is more than that of the plants and animals.  Of course we recognize the difference between plants and animals.  And we sometimes can clearly see the difference between the sentient animals and the rational animal, between ferrets and dogs and giraffes and cockroaches on the one hand, and the human being on the other.  The more we come to know about the sentient animals, the more we marvel that they are like us: that they learn and respond to stimuli and form relationships and feel and grieve.  Death is no friend of theirs, either.

But there is a great difference between the life of a horse or a dog, and the life of a human being.  They can be compared to us; but in the last analysis, they don’t measure up to us.  They can never be expected to do the self-directed work we must do; to make the tough decisions we are sometimes required to make.  There is, for them, no Jesus Christ to show them the high destiny to which we are called, a destinywhich, upon reflection, makes such perfect sense to us.  There is no one to “save” them from death. 

When we gather as we do today, to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we stand with Christians of every generation, past and future as well as the present, in the confidence that One of Us, who died by crucifixion, broke the bonds of death—which otherwise seem to us permanent and indestructible—and that this One is “on the loose,” will never be captured by death again, and has already begun to share with the likes of us the power of the resurrection.  Jesus, first in his own flesh, but also for all who will follow him, has broken the power of death.  He is the risen One; and we are a people who will rise and, indeed, are rising as we follow him. 

This life-and-death concern, along with his absolute confidence in God the Father, is what makes Jesus “resolute,” “determined,” “hard-nosed” as he heads for Jerusalem and his “being taken up.”  And it explains why Luke paints the expectations of Christian discipleship in such startling and heroic proportions.  Follow me!  There’s no place for rest here, no time to turn aside.  Follow me.  We are on the way to the destruction of death: don’t be distracted, even by death—especially by death!  Follow me.  There is no power in the past; there is only the present, leading to the future we long for.  Don’t look back.  Eyes forward.  Follow me. 

At this table, on each and every Sunday, we come together to follow Jesus through death to the fullness of life.  Here we renew our confidence in God’s power over death, and our commitment to follow Jesus.  Here, Jesus meets us with the assurance that death cannot overcome us, if, with him, we trust our lives to the Father.  Here, the Risen One gives us himself to be the food for eternal life.  Here he forms us into his risen Body.