March 14: Christ Liberated Us from the Fear of Death
♫ Music:
Thursday, March 14
Christ Liberated Us from the Fear of Death
Scripture: Hebrews 2:14-17
Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.
Poetry:
Last Supper
by Charles Wright
I seem to have come to the end of something, but don’t know what,
Full moon blood orange just over the top of the redbud tree.
Maundy Thursday tomorrow,
then Good Friday, then Easter in full drag,
Dogwood blossoms like little crosses
All down the street,
lilies and jonquils bowing their mitred heads.
Perhaps it’s a sentimentality about such fey things,
But I don’t think so. One knows
There is no end to the other world,
no matter where it is.
In the event, a reliquary evening for sure,
The bones in their tiny boxes, rosettes under glass.
Or maybe it’s just the way the snow fell
a couple of days ago,
So white on the white snowdrops.
As our fathers were bold to tell us,
it’s either eat or be eaten.
Spring in its starched bib,
Winter’s cutlery in its hands.
Cold grace. Slice and fork.
CHRIST LIBERATED US FROM THE FEAR OF DEATH
The fear of death is mediated to us in countless ways throughout each day. It seems it is so common to our everyday lives that we barely notice it. There’s a line in today’s poem by Charles Wright’s that pictures our native state before death: “As our fathers were bold to tell us, / it’s either eat or be eaten.” That adage might be shared as a bit of patronizing advice but it is hardly ever received philosophically. We grasp such so-called “wisdom” with a visceral pang of loneliness. Words like these make us keenly aware of our isolation from others – the bare poverty of our self-reliance.
Perhaps, our best solution to such traps is the most fundamental: living with a sibling. A sister or a brother provides a basic antidote to loneliness, a need so basic it is hard to even express. We might only feel the enormity of a sibling’s comfort in their absence. What did we have? Proximity. Presence. Kinship. These gifts operate amid the perfectly mundane: Around the dinner table. Seated in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. Buckled in for a family trip. And the monumental: Dressed in matching suits on a Saturday in church. Whispering around the same hospital bed where a newborn sleeps. Stood opposite one another carrying a wooden casket. Whether its mundane or monumental, such moments extend to us the promise that we may not be as alone as we feel. In spite of the trials, we’re assured that at least we have each other. Together; our simply being there becomes a being there together. Such kinship is on view in Gauguin’s portrait of his favorite daughter and a son – Aline Gauguin and One of Her Brothers, (c. 1883). Their quiet company, perhaps a world of kinship unto itself, proved to be an inspiration to the troubled artist.
Our experiences offer only glimpses of this liberating kinship. Christ, by contrast, grants us a complete and fulfilling solidarity. As our brother, Jesus goes ahead of us into the dark loneliness of death and he does so completely alone. He overcame the isolation of the grave by this solitary sacrifice. This is no glancing hope, but rather an abiding theme in Scripture. Indeed, it’s a defining feature of divine redemption, which is foretold in Psalm 68: “Our God is a God of salvation, and to God, the Lord, belongs escape from death.” Deliverance is ours, because our Incarnate Christ has himself escaped the tomb. In this way, then, God’s victory for us is in no way dependent on us. Now, Jesus’ death-defying kinship with us grounds our unassailable comfort in life and death, or as the Heidelberg Catechism reminds us: “I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.” So let Jesus dispel your loneliness and fear of isolation with his claim on us as brothers and sisters, for he himself announces the enduring bond of his new family in Mark 3: “Here are my mother and my brothers!”
Prayer:
Grant, O Lord, that as we are baptized into the death of thy blessed Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, so by continually mortifying our corrupt affections we may be buried with him; and that through the grave and gate of death, we may pass to our joyful resurrection; for his merits, who died, and was buried, and rose again for us, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
– Book of Common Prayer
Taylor Worley
Associate Professor of Faith and Culture
Trinity International University
Deerfield, Illinois
For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Artwork:
Aline Gauguin and One of Her Brothers, c. 1883
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin
Oil on canvas
31 cm x 47.5 cm
Private Collection
Siblings have the unique relationship of sharing a parent. They are simultaneously similar and unique, as shown in this uncharacteristic painting of relatives by artist Paul Gauguin. He uses a simple primary color palette in this portrait; nevertheless in the layered brushstrokes and tight composition Gauguin seems to show a close and complex relationship between the two children.
About the Artist:
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) was a French Post-Impressionist artist. He was one of the most significant French artists to be initially schooled in Impressionism, but he broke away from its fascination with the everyday world and pioneered a new style of painting broadly referred to as Symbolism. Gauguin experimented with new color theories and semi-decorative approaches to painting. He famously worked one summer in an intensely colorful style alongside artist Vincent Van Gogh before turning his back entirely on European society. He had already abandoned a former life as a stockbroker by the time he began traveling regularly to the South Pacific in the early 1890s. There he developed a new style that married everyday observation with mystical symbolism, a style strongly influenced by the popular arts of Africa, Asia, and French Polynesia. During the last decades of the 19th century, Gauguin was one of the key participants in a European cultural movement referred to as “Primitivism.” The term denotes the Western fascination with less industrially developed cultures and the romantic notion that non-Western people might be more genuinely spiritual or closer with the elemental forces of the cosmos than their comparatively "artificial" European and American counterparts.
About the Music:
“Fratres” from the album ECM Selected Signs III - VIII
About the Composer:
Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) is an Estonian composer of classical and sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt, an Orthodox Christian, has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-invented compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music is in part inspired by Gregorian chant. Since 2013, Pärt has had the distinction of being the most performed contemporary composer in the world. "Fratres" ("brothers" in Latin) is an instrumental composition demonstrating Pärt's tintinnabuli method of composition. Pärt's first version of the piece was composed in 1977 and scored for string quintet and wind quintet. Between 1977 and 1992, Pärt adapted the piece in scores for solo violin, string orchestra, percussion, and for violin and piano. The present violin/piano rendering by Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett is a study in musical dynamics, translating through musical sections that are both frantic and urgent into those tranquil and calm. Pärt himself defined this dichotomy as..."the instant and eternity are struggling within us."
About the Performers:
Gidon Kremer (b. 1947) is a Latvian classical violinist, artistic director, and founder of Kremerata Baltica, a chamber orchestra for outstanding young musicians from the Baltic States. Born in Riga, Latvia, Kremer began learning violin at the age of four with his father and grandfather, both distinguished string players. He studied in Latvia and Russia and went on to win a series of prestigious awards, including first prize in both the 1969 Paganini and 1970 Tchaikovsky International Competitions. Over the past five decades he has established and sustained a worldwide reputation as one of the most original and compelling artists of his generation. He has appeared on almost every major concert stage as recitalist and with the most celebrated orchestras of Europe and North America and has worked with many of the greatest conductors of the past half-century.
Keith Jarrett (b. 1945) is an American jazz and classical music pianist and composer. Jarrett started his career with jazz drummer Art Blakey, moving on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s he has enjoyed a great deal of success as a group leader and a solo performer in jazz, jazz fusion, and classical music. His improvisations draw from the traditions of jazz and other genres, especially Western classical music, gospel, blues, and ethnic folk music. In 2003, Jarrett received the Polar Music Prize, the first recipient of both the contemporary and classical musician prizes, and in 2004 he received the Léonie Sonning Music Prize. His album The Köln Concert (1975) became the best-selling piano recording in history.
About the Poet:
Charles Wright (b. 1935) is an American poet known for his lyricism and use of lush imagery in his poems about nature, life and death, and God. He received a master’s degree from the University of Iowa in 1963 and then won a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Rome. In his poetry, Wright reflects on some of the most eternal human concerns—time, truth, nature, and death—with his unending search for transcendence with elements of the ordinary amid the ineffable. Wright won the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the collection Chickamauga (1995). For the collection Black Zodiac (1997) Wright won both a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize (1998). Among Wright’s poetry prizes were the Poetry Society of America Melville Cane Award and the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement (1993), the Griffin International Poetry Prize (2007), and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (2013). In 2014–15 he served as poet laureate of the United States. He is now a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
About the Devotional Writer:
Taylor Worley
Associate Professor of Faith and Culture
Trinity International University
Deerfield, Illinois
Taylor Worley serves as Associate Vice President of Spiritual Life and University Ministries as well as Associate Professor of Faith and Culture at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois. He completed a Ph.D. in the areas of contemporary art and theological aesthetics in the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Taylor is married to Anna, and they have four children: Elizabeth, Quinn, Graham, and Lillian.