We will not turn away

Reticules. Beadles. Bottle and rag shops. Spencer jackets. Workhouses. Pints of porter. Bodices, bonnets, Broughams, chariots, ostlers. No work of fiction has featured the forgoing in a hundred years or more, yet no Victorian novel is without them. I’m pretty sure that if you excised these, for us, quaint period details, the storyline would still be the same, albeit resembling Bridgerton or a modern costume Shakespeare-. Something would be missing but not much. Very few plots hinge on a Brougham or a reticule, in contemporary speak a coach or a clutch bag. Even The Importance of Being Earnest, killer line though it is, would not really be any different had  the baby been swaddled in a Gladstone or a plastic carrier rather than a handbag.  Lots in the literature of the last century but one is for us local colour, adding the costume to the drama, but the drama still grips without the period detail.  There is one  a staple of the nineteenth century novel, however, which it’s difficult to see how it could be lost without some root and branch rebuilding of the narrative, and that is death bed scene.

For our literary forbears, the novelistic potential of a person’s final hours were almost unlimited. Last minute reconciliations, confessions that change everything, the true character of friends, families and spouses revealed; the expiring able to honestly evaluate their lives and name their mistakes and regrets before being reconciled to their maker with the help of the institutional church  because, in fiction at least, whenever there is someone dying in their bed it won’t be long before a priest turns up to console, comfort and chastise. The death bed scene is much older than the novel of course- there is a whole genre of intertestamental religious scripture based on the purported on-the-way-out speeches of the patriarchs and other well known Bible figures. A bit later, there are some moving endings in saintly hagiography, the passing of Saint Bede, for example, is particularly beautifully described. But the dramatic potential of the person departing from this world is not fully realised till we reach the 19th century novel.

So, if it’s Victoriana you’ve got to start at the pinnacle,  with Dickens, where you’re never far away from someone expiring in the sheets: mothers die giving birth to infants who are more than likely to have themselves become bedridden and buried before the book gets much further; those who live to adulthood are only ever a fever away from meeting their maker ‘neath the counterpane. Dombey and  Son goes for the bullseye and the book opens with a death bed scene and ratchets up the melodramatic gloom from then on. 

Balzac’s heroines frequently succumb to the fatal peril of the broken heart, though the process naturally involves several weeks of picturesque gradual fading and diaphanous final word-giving — everything taking  just enough time to allow the secret lover to turn up to witness the languid last words in the boudoir. Less pretty characters die surrounded by servants and family desperately searching for the will under the pillows they are pretending to plump. George Eliot, true,  prefers sudden accidental drownings  but the Brontës can’t resist the trope— what else can Heathcliff do but force his way into the bedroom of Cathy as she shuffles off the mortal mattress? Sister Charlotte plays with her reader’s already developed expectations as Jane Eyre attends the deathbed of her aunt who refuses to play by the script that she should be reconciled.As in the West, so the East: the sprawling War and Peace has several drawn-out departures while  forged of the sternest stuff Dostoevsky hammers existential plot hinges for the Brothers Karamazov as a monk’s body unexpectedly putrefies after he perishes on the pallet.

As they leave this world the dying are accorded special insights, wisdom, honesty. In the gathered onlookers is the drama to be found. There are tears, of course, and grief and loss that is heartrending and searing and traumatic. But whatever the histrionics they bring, death is still there, centre stage. In the nineteenth century, in literature at least, people were allowed to die.

Fast forward through the ensuing decades and by the time we reach the present day, the deathbed is almost unheard of in popular culture. Yes, by the time they reach eighteen,  children will have seen upwards of sixteen thousand violent deaths depicted on the small screen, not mentioning countless gaming shoot me ups; unless they have a thing for costume dramas it’s highly likely not one will have seen a depiction of someone dying in their bed.

Perhaps this is art imitating life, writers merely reflecting what they know, unable as we all are, to escape their times and places and cultures. The horror of the middle ages was to die unexpectedly; for all the march of industrial progress, religiously, the Victorians lingered in that wake. Now the denouement most of us seem to hope for is not to know when the end is coming, we’d rather not know. And who can blame us? Death is hard. But however much we deny it, try to push it away, medicalise it, postpone it, fight against it,  it happens regardless. It is a merciless foe, a bitter enemy and always victorious in the end.

I’m pretty sure you don’t want to think about this, this morning. I don’t want to think about this this morning. But  you know as well as I do that not everything goes away if you ignore it. We’re conservative in our liturgy at St Mary’s if not much else, and today  begins that part of Lent called Passiontide, when the focus of our faith fixes on the suffering and death of Jesus: not in a bed, but  very publicly on a cross. That’s why some of what is normally visible in the church is covered today, so our gaze has nothing to rest on but the Cross.

Everything about Christianity leads to the Cross.

Death, a particular death, a public death, a death you can’t hide away, or medicalise or ignore is at the heart of our religion.

And this death is not sudden and unexpected. It has been looming, ever larger, from the beginning of the tale; now it is inescapable, it will not be pushed to the sidelines; it even protrudes itself into a dinner given in Jesus honour.

Jesus is visiting his friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus. They throw him a party and in the middle of it, Mary does something very odd. She takes a jar of really expensive perfume and pours it on Jesus’ feet. Wasteful, perhaps, as Judas points out. Scandalous, certainly, as the only reason anyone would have that much ointment of Nard in the house is if it was a tool of her trade, and, how shall we put this, Mary was not a perfumer. But worst of all is the awful solemnity, because what Mary is announcing is that Jesus is going to die. Here in the gospel is what we most fear: it is the diagnosis we dread receiving; it is the news the doctor dreads having to give; it is the time everybody dreads meeting our gaze.

Judas clearly doesn’t get what’s going on; probably, from their subsequent behaviours, none of the other disciples did either, and if even if they did, just like us, they pretended it didn’t happen, that that wasn’t what it meant, that  when the smell of the perfume had faded away, everything was going to carry on just the same as before.

But Mary knew. And Jesus knew.

Jesus is going to die. 

And death is a merciless foe, a bitter enemy and always victorious in the end. Today war is declared, the bugle has sounded, battle is joined.

Jesus is going to die.

Christianity, our faith, does not shy away from this. The universal symbol of Christianity is the Cross, as stark a visualisation of death as you can get. So we know there will be no story without his dying. 

We’re not in denial. The process is heartrending and searing and traumatic; Jesus will suffer; we will watch the light leave his eyes and the life leave his body. And we won’t turn away, however much it tears our hearts. Because we know that Death’s victory is the battle, not the war.

Jesus is going to die.

No life before or since has the import of Jesus’ and all deaths, before or since have been changed by that one death.

Jesus is the firstborn from the dead, the firstborn of the new creation, the first to live the resurrection life. Death has won the battle; it will lose the war.

So. As Christians we can sit and watch and wait with Jesus as he prepares to die. It will be hard, heartbreaking, almost unbearable, but we can do it. The tears will come; the anger, the aching, the absence. 

We can stare death in the face and not turn away.

From today the Cross will loom ever larger in our sights, till on Good Friday it will be all we can see, we will not be able to look away.

The Cross, yes, is a stark symbol of death. 

And the Cross is the ultimate symbol of victory over death.