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The cords of death entangled me, the anguish of the grave came over me; I was overcome by distress and sorrow. Then I called on the name of the Lord: “Lord, save me!” …  For you, Lord, have delivered me from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling, that I may walk before the Lord in the land of the living. (Psalm 116:3-4, 8-9)

Death and life.  It shows up all over the Bible, not just in the story of Jesus and his death on the cross.  I hope you don’t feel that I’m unduly belaboring the point from Sunday’s sermon, but death and life is one of the most central threads through the scriptures.

There are perhaps two things worth underscoring here in Psalm 116.  Firstly, that it is God that saves us from death.  And he does it precisely at the moment when we give up all of our hopes in any other form of salvation and simply cry out to him: “Lord, save me!” 

This is the story of any journey of repentance we have ever been on, but it is also the story of any other spiritual journey we can be on.  This is the journey of learning to forgive.  This is the journey of grieving.  This is the journey of love and of marriage, and of so many other things that require more of us than we can actually give or do.  In each of these cases there comes a moment when we say: I cannot love this person again, not after what they did, unless it is by your grace—Lord, save me!  Or, I cannot carry on without this person I loved unless it is by your grace—Lord, save me! 

Each of these are moments of death and surrender.  Moments of dying with Jesus.  But those are also the moments when we meet Jesus most profoundly.  Because he comes.  He delivers us from death, he is present with us in our sorrow, he gives us the grace to forgive, or to love, or to be transformed, or to turn away from sin.  He gives us, in other words, new life.  He saves us.

And this is the second thing to underscore.  Dying with Jesus is not just about dying.  If it’s only about that part—it sounds too hard and masochistic, frankly.  Thankfully it’s not only about dying.  It is about that fact that it is in death that we find new life.  In those little moments of death, the new life of Christ is also born within us as he saves us again.  Brings us more fully into the land of the living where we experience yet another taste of that “life to the full” that Jesus promises. 

I don’t know what else to call this other than a paradox.  But it is why the Christian church has chosen to mark itself with an instrument of death as its identity symbol all these years.  We are marked by the cross.  It is the symbol of Christianity--because Christians know that this cross means far more than just death.  It means life, true life, full life.  The only kind of life that is life: the life lived by those who have faced death, surrendered themselves to God, and have been raised on the other side to new life in Christ.