Why followers of Jesus should think differently about the end of life.
Recently I was riding the in the car with my dad discussing, of all things, death. My dad is a physician, and we were discussing the monumental costs and challenges that come with end-of-life care. I shared with him some conversations I had observed in classes at my seminary where both students and professors were suggesting that, as Christians, perhaps we need to rethink our approach to end-of-life care.
They suggested that Christians should be the ones most willing to forgo expensive medical treatment that will only extend life for a few more days or weeks so that medical resources can instead be devoted to those who have a chance to most benefit from their use. In other words, while Christians should certainly seek healing medical treatments when they are available, they should be most willing to accept death when it comes.
My dad, an agnostic, proceeded to tell me about a family friend who, as part of his job as a physician, is often responsible for determining when medical care is “futile” and should be stopped, with patients then transferred to hospice care or unplugged from machines. Often making such decisions requires consulting with family members and sharing their loved one’s fate with them. An unenviable job if there ever was one.
My dad told me that for this physician, who is a Roman Catholic, one people group is consistently the most difficult to deal with when these sorts of medical decisions need to be made.
Christians.
Refusing to Die
In his experience, Christians are the ones who often refuse to accept the inevitability of death, and thus make his job more difficult than it already is. Even when a loved one had entered an entirely vegetative state, Christians would often refuse to allow that loved one to die. They often insist that they be allowed to pray for a miracle seemingly indefinitely.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not against praying for miracles. I believe in miracles, and I believe God heals. I believe we should pray for the sick, and I believe we should ask God to heal. I also know that end-of-life decisions for loved ones are among the most gut-wrenching decisions people ever have to make. This is not an issue to be discussed flippantly.
But at the same time, it seems to me there is a real theological problem if our Christian hope lies entirely in God’s ability to heal, and not in the resurrection. Hope placed entirely in God’s ability to physically heal is, in a sense, misplaced hope because even those who are healed die eventually. True Christian hope is an eternal hope that goes beyond death.
I know I could die tomorrow and I could die 80 years from now. More than likely I will die somewhere in between. All of my loved ones face the same fate. I know even if I were to be stricken with a deadly disease and then healed, death would still come for me eventually. No matter how many bananas I eat, that truth is inescapable.
And yet, so many of us, as theologian Stanley Hauerwas has said, are desperate to think medicine will get us out of life alive, even though medicine can’t do that. We are terrified of death.
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SOURCE: Relevant Magazine
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