An Air India plane with more than two hundred people on board has crashed near the airport in India’s western city of Ahmedabad, officials said this morning. The flight was scheduled to depart at 3:40 a.m. ET. The plane was taking off and was headed to London’s Gatwick airport when it crashed in a densely populated civilian area, causing a massive fire with billowing black smoke.
At the time of writing, officials have not yet confirmed whether there are fatalities. However, the company that owns Air India has activated an emergency center, stating, “Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with the families and loved ones of all those affected by this devastating event.”
When we hear or see news like this, we are immediately shocked by the tragedy and grieve for all those affected. And we are forced to admit the reality of our mortality. Humans are brilliant enough to create machines that can fly at incredible speeds and heights, but not brilliant enough to ensure our safety when we travel on them. It is the same with every other dimension of our lives—our cars can crash, our homes can collapse in a storm. Medical science is more advanced than ever, but our bodies still grow sick and die.
None of this is what you wanted to read this morning, or what I wanted to write when I woke up and started to work. But the Christian faith offers a hope in the face of mortality found nowhere else, a way of seeing death and life that redeems the former and embraces the latter.
This hope was expressed long ago in a surprising way that is still powerfully relevant today.
“I shall have become a human being”
St. Ignatius of Antioch was, according to early tradition, a disciple of the Apostle John. In the year 107, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Trajan, he was arrested and ordered to renounce his faith. He refused, so he was bound in chains and sent to Rome for execution, where he was fed to the lions in the Circus Maximus.
On his journey to Rome, he wrote seven letters to various Christian congregations. The last was to the church in Rome, asking them not to try to stop his martyrdom. In it, he wrote:
The pains of birth are upon me. Be understanding, my brethren: do not hinder me from coming to life, do not wish me to die. I desire to belong to God: do not give me to the world, do not try to deceive me with material things. Allow me to receive the pure light: when I have reached it, I shall become a man.
In this sense, he continued, “Allow me to follow the example of the Passion of my God.” He added that when he died, he would “succeed in reaching God” and in that moment “shall have received true mercy, and I shall have become a human being.”
His letter frames physical death in a way I find enormously encouraging.
“This mortal body must put on immortality”
God created us for eternity, not for this finite time and fallen world. This earthly life is therefore our “gestation period,” that time during which we are being formed for the life to come. Then, when we “die,” we are “born” into the life for which we were always intended.
However, those who are still in the “womb” of this world cannot see those in heaven any more than a baby still in its mother’s womb could see a sibling who left her body to be born. Like a baby in its mother’s womb, this world is all they know. When we were in the womb, if we had been given the choice to remain where it seemed safe and familiar rather than being expelled through a painful physical process into a world we had no proof even existed, we might well have sought to stay where we were and feared what came next.
But imagine that someone who had been born into the world outside the womb could somehow reduce themselves down to become a fetus again and speak to us in ways we could understand. Their “resurrection” from what we would call death would be proof that the same could happen one day for us (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:20).
In this case, what we knew as death would be the essential precursor to life that far transcends the life we had known. This is what Paul meant when he wrote, “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable” (v. 50). To the contrary, “this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality (v. 53, my emphasis).
“The ringing testimony of the Christian faith”
Knowing that death is but the gateway to true life can change the way Christians approach every moment of every day until that time.
First, we are emboldened to serve Jesus at all personal costs, knowing that the worst that can happen to us in this world leads to the best that can happen to us. We already “have eternal life” (John 3:16), so we can face persecution with joy and adversity with hope. Singing hymns at midnight can be our witness to our fellow “prisoners” until the prison doors are opened and we are set free (Acts 16:25–26).
Second, we are encouraged to use this world for the world to come, knowing that all we see is fleeting but that present faithfulness echoes in eternity. Br. Lucas Hall of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston is right: “Our daily tasks, even very good and important ones, are not themselves eternal, and so derive their worth from how much they facilitate [our] encounter with Jesus, the eternal living God.” Living for the next world turned this world “upside down” (Acts 17:6) and will do so again.
Please take a moment to pray for all those affected by the Air India crash. Then take another moment to reflect on the fact of your mortality. If Jesus is your Lord, embrace his promise that “everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:26). And ask the Spirit who empowered the first Christians at Pentecost to empower your faith and witness today.
When early believers faced growing opposition and persecution, they prayed for the Lord to “grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness” (Acts 4:29). As a result, “the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness” (v. 31).
Now it’s our turn.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr believed,
“The God whom we worship is not a weak and incompetent God. He is able to beat back gigantic waves of opposition and to bring low prodigious mountains of evil. The ringing testimony of the Christian faith is that God is able.”
Do you agree?
Quote for the day:
“Death is the chariot our heavenly Father sends to bring us to himself.” —Erwin Lutzer
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