Principles of Immortality

“No-one needs to live forever. I think that sometimes you can outstay your welcome.”

Gemma Malley, The Declaration (2008)

 

So the cross was an instrument of death, yet its image is presumably chosen for sepulchral use because of the life it ultimately represents. So many layers.

The Declaration by Gemma Malley is one of the many dystopian science-fiction novels that have been published for the young adult market in recent years; in fact, it is a particularly typifying example of the genre, featuring, as it does, a female protagonist, a significant romantic subplot, and a pair of sequels that neatly transform it into a trilogy – and, of course, an oppressive and morally-questionable governmental system which the main characters must defy.¹ In this particular instance, the key feature of the said system is the Declaration of the book’s title, a legal contract which people must sign to obtain access to Longevity, a drug that cures all diseases and allows those who take it to stay alive apparently indefinitely. Subscribers of the Declaration agree not to have children; any they do have are classed as ‘Surplus’ and effectively enslaved, a situation in which we find protagonist Anna at the beginning of the story.

The picture Malley paints of a world in which people can live forever is extremely bleak. Even aside from the obvious ethical issues of reducing children to subhuman status, it’s not all rainbows and smiles for the elderly ‘Legals’ either. For a start, perpetual life doesn’t amount to perpetual youth: the Legals’ bodies continue to display the signs of ageing. “Longevity doesn’t cure gravity, unfortunately, Mrs. Sharpe had told [Anna] when she’d been caught frowning at a particularly painful-looking thing that she discovered was called an ‘Uplifter’.”² Second, the Legals, for the most part, maintain the same routines year after year and decade after decade, never doing anything even vaguely interesting or innovative, which might have its advantages in societal terms – “No-one had the imagination or energy to bother with crime any more” – but seems like a pretty dull and depressing way to spend eternity. And finally, Longevity isn’t infallible. The trilogy ultimately sees all the Legals wiped out by a Longevity-resistant virus, their immune systems having been mollycoddled by the drug for so long as to no longer stand any chance of fighting back.

There emerges from all this a pretty strong message that living forever is a Bad Thing. In fact, living forever is presented as barely counting as living at all, simply by virtue of its endlessness.

“No-one needs to live forever. I think that sometimes you can outstay your welcome.”

“I know that we have to live every moment, because we won’t be here forever, and that I wouldn’t want to be anyway. Because knowing something’s going to end makes you appreciate it more, makes you want to savour every moment.”

“You see, what I want is life. A real life, full of moments of joy, of anguish, of irritation, of fun. A life with an end point, which makes each second important.”

“Long life, short life – did it matter when each day was the same, when humans were incapable of living for the moment because of their fundamental need for order, for the comfort of everyday routine.”

“The only people who fear death are the ones who haven’t lived.”

And indeed, it’s hard to argue that the kind of living forever that exists in the world of The Declaration has any real positives at all. But then, it turns out that that kind of living forever isn’t actually living forever at all; as I already mentioned, by the end of the series, everyone who takes Longevity ultimately ends up dying too. It just takes them a few decades longer than usual – fleeting moments in universal terms.

 

Excuse for a pretty space picture to suggest the idea of cosmic smallness. When you consider the fact that the light from some of the stars we see has already taken thousands of years just to reach our eyes, a few decades of life really doesn’t seem like much.

The same is true for every model of immortality the world of fiction has to offer. A vampire lives forever – until you stake it through the heart.³ A robot lives forever – until it is irreparably damaged by some technological assault.⁴ Voldemort spent his whole life seeking everlasting life through whatever dark magic was necessary, but that didn’t stop his eventual demise at the hands of a skinny, bespectacled teenager named Harry Potter.⁵ It’s actually beside the point that these methods theoretically offer a way to live forever: if the potential to die is still there, then, simply by statistics, at some point in the whole of eternity, that potential is going to end up being exploited. Living forever is not actually living forever unless it comes with a guarantee of forever. Anything else, however long it might last, is merely a postponement of death.

Managing to spend a slightly longer time running away from an enemy than your predecessors did does not amount to conquering the enemy. Conquest requires confrontation; yet nobody ever beat death by bravely staring it in the face, either. None of us has the power to overcome death: whether one dies desperately fleeing death or determinedly facing up to it, one is still inevitably going to end up dead.

Well. With one rather important exception.

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.”

That’s from 1 Corinthians 15.⁶ Keep your Bible open to the page (or keep the relevant tab open on whatever browser you use); we’ll come back to it a couple of times during the remainder of the post. Christ died, was buried, was raised, and was seen, once raised, by over five hundred witnesses who were willing to testify to the fact (‘most of whom are still alive’ surely implies ‘so you can go and ask them if you’re not convinced’). This is a different kind of death-beating strategy: not just prolonging life, not just managing to stave off the inevitable for an unusually long time, but going toe-to-toe with death and actually winning. If it sounds beyond belief, well, that’s because it basically is. It stands at odds with everything we know about death. But that surely makes it all the more the case that, if Jesus really did rise from the dead – and I for one honestly believe that he really did⁷ – then that’s something worth at the very least sitting up and taking notice of. In fact, that’s something so utterly unprecedented, so exceptional, so unbelievable, that if it’s true, it has to redefine the whole way we think about life and death, and about everything Jesus said and did.

 

Look, a familiar adorable children’s creative project based on the single most important event in the whole of history. The resurrection matters more than I know how to express: it cannot be relegated to the craft cupboard.

“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

We’re still in 1 Corinthians 15. Now Christ is represented as the firstfruits – the first bit of the harvest, the bit that guarantees the rest will be ripening soon – of resurrection. Jesus didn’t just temporarily knock death out; he completely broke it. There was death, busily manufacturing corpses from powerless humans, when along came something that refused to be processed in the same way, that jammed the system and sent it into meltdown. Because of Jesus, death is no longer able to do its job; it no longer holds that power over us. Jesus’ resurrection is a model for the resurrection to come: in him we have a guarantee that the dead can and will be raised. And death will be completely destroyed.

“I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

‘Death is swallowed up in victory.

O death, where is your victory?

O death, where is your sting?’”

Yup, still in 1 Corinthians 15. Resurrection isn’t just a case of returning to the same miserable little existence we enjoy at the moment. When we are raised, we will be raised imperishable. Immortal. Unkillable. This is real living forever, with a guarantee that it cannot end. It’s not a postponement, but a genuine victory. Jesus took on death and won, and he invites us to share the victory.

It’s a million miles away from what the Legals in The Declaration like to parade as everlasting life. There is no chink in the armour, no susceptibility to decay, no possibility that ‘forever’ won’t really mean forever. This is not about making life as we know it now last a bit longer. It’s not even about continuing perpetually to exist according to life as we know it now. For one thing, such an existence really would be rubbish, a possibility not undeserving of the kind of bleak picture painted by Gemma Malley, because life as we know it now is imperfect; but furthermore, because life as we know it now is imperfect, it simply doesn’t offer the possibility of ‘forever’. Things that are imperfect are bound by their nature to end sooner or later. Jesus’ resurrection, by contrast, kills death, and brings that very necessity of ending to an end, and makes all of us who are in him imperishable and perfect, so that we can, in perfection, endure forever.

“One day my God gon’ crack the sky.

He gon’ bottle up every tear that we ever cried,

Bring truth to every lie, justice for every crime.

All our shame will be gone and we’ll never have to hide.

No more broken hearts, no more broken homes,

No more locking doors, no more cops patrolling,

No abusive words or abusive touches,

No more cancerous cells that’ll take our loved ones,

No more hungry kids, no more natural disasters,

No child will ever have to ask where his dad is,

No funerals where we wear all black,

And death will be dead and we’ll lock the casket.” – Andy Mineo, ‘Death Has Died’, Heroes for Sale (2013)⁸

And we shall all be changed. I don’t know about you, but I seriously cannot wait.

Footnotes

¹ For a blurb less skewed towards my personal blogging agenda, see Gemma Malley’s website: http://www.gemmamalley.com/book/the-declaration/.

² For this and all quotations used in this post, I am indebted to the Goodreads website, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/777173.Gemma_Malley?page=1, as well as to the wikispace for someone’s Year 9 English class, which provided this useful thematically-grouped list of quotations: https://year9bbenglish.wikispaces.com/file/view/quotes+from+The+Declaration.doc.

³ There are a fair few bits of vampire-themed fiction about that I like; I talked about CBBC’s Young Dracula last week, so today I’ll recommend The Reformed Vampire Support Group by Catherine Jinks: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5266733-the-reformed-vampire-support-group. It’s not really giving it enough credit to call it a response to or a subversion of the typical glamorous teen vampire romance novel, but the way it absolutely flies in the face of that whole genre is certainly one of its many appreciable qualities.

⁴ As in the CBBC drama Eve: antagonist Mary Douglas builds robots under the title ‘Project Eternity’ and with the aim of achieving immortality – but one blast from an EMP device and even the most sophisticated robot is immediately destroyed. The whole of the second series is currently available on iPlayer, http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b06g95c6, if you’d like to catch up.

⁵ On which note, the Pottermore website has recently been relaunched, so if you weren’t happy with your original house or wand and fancy another turn, now you can: https://www.pottermore.com/.

⁶ I know I always tell you to read the whole chapter, but this time I encourage you to do so especially strongly. There’s oodles more in it that I haven’t been able to explore in this post, but that has important implications for what I’ve been looking at: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+15&version=ESV.

⁷ There are all sorts of people who put forward evidence for the resurrection in quite brilliant fashion; I’ll suggest this recently-published webcomic by Adam4d, http://adam4d.com/jesus-rose-from-dead/, not least because I’ve been looking for an excuse to recommend his work for a while.

⁸ Some kind human called Justin Montero has made a lyric video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWCVyD3BkQk. Among Andy Mineo’s many excellent songs, this is a particular favourite of mine.