I. Technology
A year ago, I attended the CPT’s annual conference, which was themed around technology and the church. Alongside vocational ministers and students of gospel and grace, I listened to the many thought-provoking, soul-stirring words, and at the end of the second day, I drove home and wept, because we no longer know how to suffer.
It was not a conference on suffering, or death, or pain, or evil. The conversations sifted through social media, liturgy, virtual reality, bioethics, and artificial intelligence; sorting through both the good and the uncertain. When opportunity was given, those listening asked questions of their congregants and how to speak into tangled decisions; of their sermons and when to tweet and when to stay silent; of their own lives and how to train up a child immersed in a feed. The questions and answers were honest, exposing our concerns and constraints and causing us to look down difficult paths. I forget the question that sparked it now, something of technology and our hungry pursuit of it, but I remember one answer as it settled into the place where we quietly hurt the most: we have forgotten how to suffer.
It is easy to articulate the glory of technology, for it promises that something of this life will be easier, more accessible, lessened of pain, and fattened with joy. And it is true: there are marvelous advancements in treatments of disease, new supports and therapies for those with disabilities, and broad possibilities for learning and growing. But so quickly the tool slips away from a gift given and cuts to the places it should not go. Suddenly technology becomes a sharp blade against the soul, a saw on the ends of our attention, sandpaper against our love. We assume technology as a right; a promise to us that we deeply desire to be true and desperately demand to taste. We swore we would put away idols, yet we welcome this that makes the promises of gods and sets up an altar for itself in our homes and hands and at our table. It promises life, and life everlasting. Is this not for your good? Taste and see. We believe we are living in a glorious new age, but we turn away from reckoning with its violence. The gods are bloodthirsty, but our crops are growing.
The most harmful of our technologies seem to be those that remove us from the here and now. They become a sip of immortality: drink me, and forget. Watch me, and think of nothing else. Soon we begin to fear time and feel trapped by space: where is our ingress to elsewhere? We thought we were saving moments, learning better, living well. We found an escape from fear, a gateway from guilt, a portal away from the entrapment of life itself. Come and be happy, be healed, live well. And there, we begin to demand what we cannot have from that which demands what we should not give.
The last day of the conference, I wrestled with our response. How do we retrain our whole selves to treasure life–this physical, painful life; unfiltered and uncropped? How do we learn to embrace time, when time itself will take so much from us? How do we learn to love these places that feel like tombs? How do we return to sit around the table, when those empty places remind us of what we do not and cannot have?
II. Death
Ten days after the conference, my grandpa died. He was ninety-one; a man with trembling hands and shuffling feet, a wavering jaw and failing eyes. His death was quite on time and terribly untimely; I knew that he would die my whole life, and my whole life had not prepared me to know that he was dead.
During my last visits with him, his decline became rapid; his face sagging, his words slurring to inarticulate mush. Instead of reading a passage aloud to me, he handed me the book, a shaking finger placed on the page to tell me where to begin. We savored those last conversations, but the pace was slowing. Maybe he knew that this was a different kind of ebb. Maybe I did. Maybe we were already in the swamp of encroaching death and could not yet realize how difficult the walk would be.
In those last days, we became powerless. On the final night he still sat upright, he asked me, for the first and last time, to feed him. It was a strange grace to know the depth of that request – to know he recognized and entrusted me with an act that he could no longer do. The losses accumulated over that last week, releasing each final act of life: to walk, to stand, to sit, to see, to speak, to swallow, to breathe. In the end, the line blurred between life and death, just too long a space between breaths, just a realization that I had seen the last one long after it was taken.
Planning his memorial service was an exercise in honor and memory: what was he like? What did he love? What did he say? What could we possibly say of him now? We brought small items that spoke of him: his fisherman’s cap, his Bible, a theology book, a photograph. We sang hymns and read his favorite verses and laughed over his classic phrases. And yet he did not come. None of those things could resurrect him. We could only remember him, mark how he had been present, and treasure that we had been able to care for him even to the end.
As vividly as I remember him now, I know that my remembering will fade and become less like him. All the pictures and stories can aid with memory, but it will not be enough in the end. It was never meant to be enough. The day after his service, I sat in church and took notes on the sermon and wondered, with sorrow and foolishness, ‘who will I share this with now?’ Grandpa is gone, my theology buddy, my staunch lover of the Word and chocolate-covered raisins. I can speak to anyone else about the Lord, but I can no longer speak to Grandpa about Him.
That is what I miss. Just him. I can hear someone say “Ah, so.” and it is not him. It may sound very akin to him, but it is not him. His very body is no longer here, and that is what I miss the most. I miss holding his shaky hand, seeing him tuck a pencil behind his ear, and kissing the top of his head as I leave. I miss his plaid shirts and the sound of his slippers. I miss his dear face.
III. Incarnation
It is a strange and unsettling mystery that God became man. Why would He choose this–this life, this body, this death? There is nothing desirable about the long decay, about being clothed in skin that can be pierced, lungs that can fail, eyes that can become blind. And yet the entire gospel narrative hints and whispers and, ultimately, cries aloud in triumphant chorus that this became so: Immanuel, God with us. He became flesh, to give life, and life more abundantly.
And it is in the flesh, in the Son of Man, that is life. Not a magical elixir or miracle of technology that makes us forget, but a drinking of blood and tasting of body that makes us most attend. How can we forget who we really are when face to face with the scars of Christ? How can we forget where we are when on our knees before Him? How can we forget to whom we belong when we cry: “Our Father?”
There is nothing quite like death to take account of our promises. As much as I wished to relieve Grandpa’s suffering and find an escape, in the end what meant the most was when I read him Colossians and he squeezed my hand, when I wiped his eyes and he saw his grandchildren, when we stood by his side and he prayed for his wife of seventy years and for each of his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren by name. In those moments, technology became a way for those not there in body to glimpse his face, hear his voice, be comforted – without promises or replacement. No one could say: this is the same as that. Death was too stark, too great, too forceful to let empty promises remain.
I know there is a place for our instruments, for us to work in this world for the good of Christ’s body and the proclamation of Himself. There is a way to melt our golden calves and refashion them as tools of beauty and aid. But we will never do so if we deem their promises more real than those of our Father. And we will never submit to the breaking of our idols if we are not willing to bear with suffering.
We can run from it, to where the gods are plentiful, but despair is just one missed sacrifice away; or we run to it, finding self-martyrdom as our altar, with our gods only pleased by our own blood. But in our flight from life itself, we have embraced the golden promises and found them empty, for there is no body, no presence, no participation to make them real. Suffering digs so deeply into our person that only a Person can meet us there. Underneath the veiled prescriptions and well-meaning explanations, we find Him, in whom all things hold together, including our own bodies and our fragile lives.
T.F. Torrance wrote, “God does not execute his judgment on evil simply by smiting it violently away by a stroke of his hand, but by entering into it from within, into the very heart of the blackest evil, and making its sorrow and guilt and suffering his own.” This is not a simple metaphor or useful portrait. This is a baby, pushed from a womb; this is a man, washed in a river; this is a son, nailed to a cross; this is a body, laid in a tomb; this is Christ, resurrected anew. And with scars on a real, physical body, Christ says “Taste and see.” And we do so as the body every week, bringing our sorrow and guilt and suffering within the body of Christ and saying: “Do unto me.”
No longer can we lay our time and attention at the feet of our gods and demand to be happy and healed in return. How fearful it is instead to give to a God who needs nothing from us and owes nothing to us! And yet we receive: take and eat, take and drink, this is given for you, that you may have life, and life everlasting.
What empty promises we have taken to ourselves, what severe mercy that we find them lacking, what terrible grace that only He is enough.
This resource is part of the series God in Flesh – Reflections on Advent and Incarnation. Click Here to explore more resources from this series.
Rae Paul is the Executive Administrator of the Center for Pastor Theologians. She earned her BA in Theology from the Moody Bible Institute and also serves as Ministry Associate for Adult Education at Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park, IL. She is currently enrolled at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, studying for an MA in Theology.
