Reflections on the Death of the World's Oldest Person

Gertrude Baines, at the ripe old age of 115, passed away last week.

What a long life to live! This is a person who was born 1894, was an adult by the time WWI hit, was in her 40s during the Great Depression, and lived to see a world of internet and mass media and mass electricity. The fact that a person can see the world change multiples times over in her lifetime fascinates me.

And something else fascinates me. It's quite an obvious observation: everybody dies. While the human body is a remarkably resillient organism and a biological wonder and it can endure and live through such lengths, it still meets its end. Baines was living proof of that.

Every person dies. All of the optimism of modern technology and health care and all of the immediacy of the glory of the present moment cannot escape this truth. But even though every person dies, it isn't the end of every person's life. And it isn't the end of their material existence either.

Christians have this curious belief, you see. Many Christian traditions recite the Apostles Creed (and pretty much all true Christians accept it as orthodoxy), and there's this phrase in there that is cause for hope (a phrase that is admittedly straight out of Scripture). It says: "We believe in the immortality of the soul."

Oh wait, no it doesn't. It doesn't say that. It really says: "We believe in the resurrection of the body." That's right, our bodies get resurrected. They get redeemed and used all over again for eternity. Material existence matters to God. To hope in heaven is to hope in earth. But to hope just in modern progress is to hope in nothing. You get just death in the end. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, aim for heaven and get earth too but aim just for earth and you get nothing. Revelation 21 and 22, the most hopeful passages in all of Scripture, depict a New Heaven and a New Earth: redeemed and glorified souls united with new bodies.

Baines death has cause to give us hope. Everybody dies, but those who believe in Jesus receive a resurrection of their body.

And I believe in the resurrection of the body.