Death, the profound mystery!

29 May 2007

Three of our Big Men--Joses Sanga, Bart Ulufa'alu and now, Lloyd Mapeza Gina--all have left us over the past month. Their passing away brings home, in no uncertain way, to each of us that the road they traveled will be ours as well. Some in the near future. For others, the passage of years must flow under the bridge called time but there's no doubt we too will travel the very same road. All are destined to die!

Some call death absurd! But absurd means that which has no meaning and cannot have meaning. Our God can and did not create an absurd world. For most of us, however, death is a mystery . . . something that has more meaning than we have understanding.

Pain and suffering are close relatives to their ugly 'Big Brother', death. But make no mistake about it, these three--pain, suffering and death--are firmly of the same family. All three lie at the heart of the mystery of life. To fully explain one of them would be to make all three clear at the same moment. But since Adam and Eve walked this earth no one, including Christ himself, fully explained death and its two sisters, pain and suffering. They lie, however, at the heart of why God created this kind of world and made all three parts of the normal pattern of living.

On 2 April Solomon Islands was forced to learn the very same painful lesson. The Western and Choiseul provinces' tsunami wiped away in a flash the lives of more than 50 of our people--the very old, the very young and those in the prime of their lives. Our Prime Minister publicly questioned the meaning of such an event. Why had the tsunami happened? Why did it hit us? He found no easy answers!

Some attempt to link the bottomless mystery of suffering and death with there being no God. How can a merciful and all loving God allow such suffering . . . the tiny infant thrown into a fire by a drunken rebel soldier, the mass gas attack by Sadan, Hiroshima, etc? Few of us think this way, however. Others link suffering, pain and especially death to God's punishment . These and similar questions Christ never answers. Instead of answering, Christ acts. Do we want answers to the death, pain and suffering mystery, then we find it at the foot of the Cross!

The Lord works and watches over his creation, which he loves, perhaps not with human love but with, in Dante's words "the love that moves the sun, the other stars."

Death's mystery was so close to us at the Bart Ulufa'alu's burial service at Holy Cross Cathedral on Sunday last. The country's elite--political, business, church leaders--confronted the ultimate in there lives. Death looked us all in the eye and boasted that everyone in that church would be traveling the road some time soon. For death, ten days, ten months or ten years are all the same.

The essential factor that Jesus introduces into the death mystery, however, is the absolute faith in the omnipotence of love. Jesus is a free man, the only truly free man, the only man who has loved and believed with sufficient daring both to free himself from fear, from money, from habit, from the law, and from death, and to free others from the same things. During his life the sick were freed of their infirmities, the greedy were liberated from their love for money, the lustful from needs of the flesh, sinners regained their innocence and even the dead were restored to life--Jairus' daughter, Lazarus, Jesus himself.

The reality of death over the past month has struck the nation like a lightning bolt. We are not only rational creatures but believing ones as well. Death leaves us gasping for understanding, for insight. God owes us nothing yet we are his children! These are the two ends of a chain which we hold in our hands but is tangled up at our feet. Both ends are real even if we can't explain how they are.

J. Roughan
29 May 2007
Honiara.