The Hunger for Immortality

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August 9, 2015

“The Hunger for Immortality”

John 6:35, 41-51

³⁵Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."  ⁴¹Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, "I am the bread that came down from heaven." ⁴²They were saying, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, 'I have come down from heaven'?" ⁴³Jesus answered them, "Do not complain among yourselves. ⁴⁴No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. ⁴⁵It is written in the prophets, 'And they shall all be taught by God.' Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. ⁴⁶Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. ⁴⁷Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. ⁴⁸I am the bread of life. ⁴⁹Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. ⁵⁰This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. ⁵¹I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."

Sermon: “The Hunger for Immortality”

It’s no secret that living forever is among the most attractive of ideals for humanity.  An entire beauty empire is built upon the idea that time is our enemy, and we should aspire to look younger and younger, sometimes resorting to bizarre methods (like using bee venom on your face!) to get there.  Movies about immortals aren’t just vampire tales anymore…we have that theme running through the box office in films like The Age of Adaline and Lucy.  But the quest for immortality goes beyond beauty and entertainment.

Most obsessive, in my book, is what is termed the “2045 Initiative.”  Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itzkov began the project in 2011 with specialists in the fields of robotics, brain science and artificial organ development.  Their website defines their manifesto as “the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimal conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.”  

But the 2045 Initiative has moved beyond just fancy words.  They hope to have affordable, brain-controlled “avatars” by 2020, self-sufficient life support systems by 2025, what they call “cybernetic immortality” (a person’s consciousness living forever in a machine) by 2035, and finally, people’s minds being made to live in machines that far exceed current human capabilities by 2045. 

Sounds like science fiction, right?  Nearly 40,000 people from around the world have bought into the 2045 Initiative.  They don’t state their underpinning principal in any of their literature the way that I do, but I can spell it out pretty easily.  Why do they do all this?  Why try to extend life through artificial means?

It’s very simple, really.  We don’t want to die.

We may not readily accept the potential of living as a machine.  We may not sent Mr. Itzkov money to support his project.  But we share that same ethos.  It’s the same since the beginning of humanity, a primal instinct for preservation woven into our being.  Those folks who criticized Jesus that day in Capernaum had the same thought on their minds. 

But Jesus’ words didn’t make any more sense to them than the 2045 Initiative makes to some of us.  Jesus spoke of their ancestors, and his own, as it happens.  They ate manna – bread – in the wilderness, and they died.  But Jesus claimed to be the living bread, come down from heaven, and then he made them the promise that connected with their most primal core: if they ate of him, believing in him, they would not die.

It must have sounded like cannibalism to them.  But Jesus wasn’t telling them to nibble on his fingers or toes.  He was trying to describe another reality – the reality of heaven breaking into the earth in such a way that eternity seeps in with it. 

If science fiction was a thing in Jesus’ time, it would have sounded like that to the Jews gathered there.  As it was, they heard his words, not as a promise of immortality that spoke to their greatest hunger for life, but as barbarism.  It didn’t get more offensive than that for a people with rigid holiness codes for eating. 

This misunderstanding is why many early Christians were persecuted for being “flesh-eaters.”  People outside the fold of Christianity genuinely believed Christians to be cannibals who “eat the flesh” of other humans in some bizarre ritual connecting them to their Messiah. 

Jesus was not talking about cannibalism.  But he was talking about his flesh, his human body, being the medium through which eternal life was given to non-eternal beings.  No robot.  No avatar.  Just the flesh of a weary, traveling Jewish Palestinian carpenter, given freely to bring life everlasting.

He gave what doesn’t last for what would last forever.  It wasn’t an easy offering.  Those words uttered from the cross, “Eli, eli, lema, sabachthani” are translated from the Aramaic as, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

But we all know the meaning behind them, that meaning woven into humanity’s dna from our very beginning:  “I don’t want to die.”

But he did, facing our greatest fear for us, so that we might never have to fear it again.  So that we might know eternal life.  Which is not the same thing as immortality. 

Dmitry Itzkov is operating on the assumption that time is our enemy, that disease is our destruction, and that death is our end.  Immortality is the goal.  With all do respect to his great passion and work, I see things differently.  Time is not our enemy, only our inevitability.  Disease might well destroy our bodies – we have very little control over that – but it cannot kill our spirits.  Death is not our end, but instead a passage into something greater, an eternity that, try as we might, we won’t know or understand until then.

But we can get a taste of eternity, here in this life.  Just like Jesus said, we get a taste of it in this bread and this cup.  I think we also glimpse eternity in the golden light through pine trees each evening that warms our weary faces.  In the steam off of a cup of coffee each morning.  In the smile of a friend when their eyes meet ours across a room.  In the feeling that, when we admit that utterly human statement, “I don’t want to die” into the velvet blackness of the middle of the night, someone hears us.  The One who gave his flesh for all.

And here’s the thing about that God who hears what we don’t dare utter to anyone else: that God remembers.  Remembers what it was to be truly human.  Remembers what it was to have a body ache and fail.  Remembers that most primordial of fears. 

And that God answers, in those glimpses of eternity that are so everyday and ordinary we might miss them.  The answer is as simple as the statement uttered into the darkness:  “I am the bread of life.”

We never need to fear what is next.  We never need to bribe God into helping us escape it if we pray the right way or prove our faithfulness.  We don’t even need to live as robots!  We just need to taste eternity everywhere God is breaking into this world, and remember that, though there are things that fade away, though death is a part of life, there is something that remains.  There is something that survives.  And it is holy, wholly delicious life.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.