Caring for the sick: It’s what Christians do and have done since the beginning. Jesus healed the sick. Insofar as they could, his followers did the same. And whenever they could not heal, they stayed with the sick and did not abandon them.

Caring for the sick leads to other, equally Christian concerns. To find out what causes illness and then to prevent it, this too is a form of care. Thus, the motivation not only to create hospitals—places where the sick could be cared for—but also such things as sanitation systems, which can prevent some forms of sickness from coming about in the first place. To learn what causes an illness, and how to forestall it from spreading: This also arose out of the basic concern to care for, and not abandon, sick people.

The entire medical-industrial complex of our time—the expenditures of unprecedented amounts of money in medicine—can be seen as an outworking of the gospels and, in a sense, a triumph of Christian thought in the fabric of modern civilization. But the Christian ethos from which this has grown is fast receding into the past. Now, for many people, it seems the obvious next step is to conquer not just particular diseases, but disease itself, indeed, to conquer mortality. What, one might ask, could be more pro-life than to set our sights on eliminating death? What could be more pro-life than seeking human immortality?

Everyone that Jesus healed went on to die. Even Lazarus, whom Jesus summoned forth from the grave, came back to the life he had previously. Jesus healed people in order to restore them to human community—the blind could see, the lame walk, the deaf hear. And yet they remained mortal; they would eventually die. Jesus himself was no exception; he too died.

Herein lies a tension in Christian thinking about healing. We seek to prevent illness and we seek to heal from illness. We are glad that polio is largely absent from the world today, and we try to mitigate the baneful effects of viruses. But we do not seek to change our bodies into immortal flesh that will never age or need to die. The latter transition—which is the express object of some of today’s Titans of Silicon Valley—is a transition to something different, a new being who would seem to be no longer human.

Consider what it would mean if we humans tweaked our genetics so that we never had to die of anything. It would mean we would not need babies; indeed, it would put a huge question mark over allowing new people to come into existence at all. If everyone now alive were never going to die, there would be enormous pressure not to allow any newcomers. Immortality would also eliminate middle age. If life had no end, then it would have no middle. Now there might be benefits of a sort. Immortality might solve the crisis of how to pay for Social Security and Medicare (people could just go on working forever). Yet if you know you’ll always have tomorrow, there’s little energy to get anything done today. To repeat the observation: Such deathless people would hardly be recognizable as human.

I put it this way: Mortality is not a disease; it’s a definition. And thus, to be pro-life is not to be anti-death (full stop).

You may want to ask: Father Austin, isn’t Christianity about the conquering of death? Yes. Death, Christians believe, is conquered by God, who raised Jesus to life and who, according to Romans 8:11, will also give life to our mortal bodies. But in this teaching, God conquers death not by eliminating it but by changing what happens after it.

God’s conquering of death is anticipated in the story of his Son calling Lazarus from the grave, and earlier in the story of the fish that swallowed Jonah. Rather than turning us into immortal beings, God brings about a new reality on the far side of death. Thus every human life still has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes the story between the beginning and the end is a long one. Sometimes it’s very short. But it always begins—and ends.

This preserves the nature of human life as something that’s generational and transmissible.  If we had immortal bodies, there would be no children or grandchildren; there would be no sense of passing something along. This is the first thing to say about the resurrection of our own mortal bodies: When we rise from the dead our bodies will remain mortal, i.e., they will have died. And they will bear the marks of their mortality, even as Jesus had wounds to show to Thomas (and anyone else who ever desires to look upon him).

The second thing to say, however, is that those risen bodies will have undergone a change. But this change must be such that it does not undo the fact that our mortal life has been completed in death—our life will have had a beginning, a middle, and an end. The new reality after death cannot be mere continuation; it cannot be like Lazarus coming out of the grave to resume his previous life. What then might it be?

It’s there in the gift of God’s judgment. None of us ever knows the real meaning of our life. This too is related in Romans 8: It is God’s Spirit, and only God’s Spirit, who knows the depths of the human heart. We are mysteries to ourselves. So, in that final judgment, when we rise from the dead, God will say, “This is the meaning of your life.” And everyone, saint or sinner, lover of God or hater—everyone will be surprised.

And there, in God’s Spirit, is where we will find the life that God will give to our mortal bodies. This resurrection will be a gift: the revelation of the true meaning of our own life, and the invitation to enter into the glory of God’s Being. This won’t be an extension of our life, but something like a new dimension—although no words can possibly convey what eye hath not seen nor ear heard. The most we can grasp is that there is nothing better in this or any other world.

And that’s why Christian thought does not try to eliminate death: Because death is not eliminated, it is transcended.