Ben Sasse’s Road to Golgotha and the End of All of Our Exploring
It’s a me-centered world. A world focused almost entirely inward as we pursue our own self-fashioned identity, our own subjective view of the good. After all, we are Westerners, beneficiaries of the Enlightenment, and therefore, many of us believe that human flourishing should be our exclusive goal. Hence, no one should be surprised at humans’ ceaseless pursuit of more goods, more resources, more enjoyment. Given this self-centered exploration, no one should be surprised to note that self-worship has become the fastest-growing religion in the West.
Recently, former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse sat down with Ross Douthat at the New York Times and spoke about dying in a way that cuts through our self-centeredness. As Ken Blackwell notes, we see death instantly and directly on a face marked, bloodied, and worn down by the side effects of cancer treatment. After all, this is a body under assault, unable to grow its own skin, a body that only has a few months to live.
Ben Sasse talks directly to a generation that has ignored its own mortality amid its relentless pursuit of internet clicks and more satisfaction. In opposition to this prideful pursuit and our generation's demand for unremitting avenues of pleasure, Rod Dreher notes that Sasse faces his calling to die and ours. Sasse observes that even though you have “three or four months left to live, you have to redeem the time.” Suffering from five forms of cancer offers a meditation on life, on death, on politics, and on freedom.
Redeeming the time means fleeing internet algorithms that have metastasized into hate-filled sermons. Redeeming the time means—as Dreher observes—learning from a man who is suffering immensely with no hope of survival, a man who does not have the right to be so joyful. But he is, and he tells us why: “To live is Christ, to die is gain.”
To be sure, Sasse acknowledges that death is terrible, but as Nigerian and Iranian Christians surely know, it is the final enemy. Whether we live amid the comforts of the West or face the prospect of death imminently, we are all on the clock. Dealing with our final enemy requires that we acknowledge our own finitude, our own inability to keep the planets in orbit or grow skin on a bloodied face, while simultaneously admitting our own brokenness and our constant need for repentance.
Most of all, Ben Sasse asks us to remember the reality of the resurrection. He believes the scripture that says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” As Ken Blackwell notes, it is not symbolic language.
T. S. Elliot puts it this way:
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
Ben Sasse is rapidly approaching where he and we began, as he reaches the end of all his exploring, with full knowledge that God created the heavens and the earth. Knowing where we began helps us discover who we really are: little more than a mist in the face of eternity.
That realization should awaken us all.