On my way to heaven - Mark Ashton on facing death with Christ

In 2001 my mother visited us in Cambridge and, walking to church one Sunday, fell and broke her hip.

From then on she died slowly and painfully over the next four-and-a-half years. The pain was not physical so much as psychological as she gradually lost all her freedom.

As I watched her die, I prayed that I would not live into a similarly long and (through no fault of her own) useless old age, a burden to my wife and family, and an embarrassment to my friends, ‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’. I once said to the churchwardens at St. Andrew the Great that I did not want to live to be a problem to those who cared for me: bad-tempered, irritable, snapping orders at my wife Fiona, while she pushed me around in a wheelchair. One of the wardens replied that the only change would be the wheelchair!

Inoperable cancer

In the spring of 2007, while on sabbatical in New Zealand, I first had pains roughly in the area of the gallbladder, which led eventually to going into Addenbrooke’s Hospital in December 2008 to have the gallbladder removed. But when he went in to do so, the surgeon found cancer which had invaded the liver, originating in the gallbladder. It was past surgical solution and radiotherapy, and there was apparently no effective chemotherapy regime to cure gallbladder cancer. The oncologist estimated I might have six to nine months to live. My prayer when my mother died had been answered. I said to the surgeon when he broke the news that what he had just told me was, for a Christian believer, not bad news but good; it was not the end of the story, but the beginning. (And I saw an imaginary speech bubble appear above his head, saying, ‘This man is in total denial’!).

But I have lived 62 years of very happy life on the earth, and for over 40 of them Jesus has been my Lord and my Saviour. So I can have no regrets. My main reaction was then, and remains now, one of gratitude. God has done all things well, and I believe he is doing this thing well too. He is taking me back to himself when I have all my faculties, when I am still active in ministry, when my family have reached independence with their own spouses and careers, and when my wife still has the energy and vitality to face a new life-stage.

Thoughts of a dying man

There are inevitable worries. The financial provision for my wife as a clergy widow is bad (largely my own fault). Despite my huge inadequacies as a husband and a father, I fear my close family will miss me. But, taking all things into account, it is not a bad time to die.

And I have had warning. Once you have been told you are going to die, the months that follow are a very good time spiritually. The news is a spiritual tonic. ‘The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying’, wrote Sir Thomas Browne; and for me as a Christian that had certainly become true. In many ways I was more ready to die on February 8 1968, as a 20-year-old the day after my conversion, than I was in 2008 40 years later. But the warning I have now received has changed that. I can now see that much of what I have striven for and much of what I have allowed to fill my life these 40 years have been of dubious value. I am not now going to gain any further reputation or achieve anything more of significance, and I realise how little that matters. As I start to clear up my effects, I recognise how I have allowed them to clutter my life and how little I have actually needed them. While I would love to have provided better financially for my wife, I know that being ‘comfortably provided for’ will be of no spiritual help to her in the years ahead.

The finishing line

While physical things spoil and go dim, spiritual things grow brighter and clearer. I see my sin very clearly. I see how much it still controls my life. I think how little time I have got left to make further progress against my pride, my irritability, my grumpiness, my selfishness. I need to keep short accounts now, because I may never have time to make amends or apology in this life. The Bible speaks to me about this with ever greater authority and relevance. Each day as I open it, God speaks straight into my heart by his Word. And it tells me of what lies beyond this life. I can see the end of life. It looms over the horizon, and I am encouraged to think it will not now be long before I am there. As the distance between me and the finishing line decreases, I am encouraged to believe more strongly that I will make it. I know it is God’s work and not mine that will get me there, but it is still reassuring to know that the time is short and the opportunity to fall into gross sin is diminishing. I have less and less chance to betray our calling in some way, and I am comforted by that thought. I have always been aware of the huge depth of depravity of my own heart and the threat that poses to me every day. Now there are many fewer days left to face that threat than I thought.

Witnessing for Christ

Opportunities to tell others about Jesus have now also become clearer and more urgent. Our age is so devoid of hope in the face of death that the topic has become unmentionable. But once you have had the news I have had, it rears its head whether you want it to or not. I have learnt to go about it gently, after a trip to a hairdresser in Eastbourne. The girl cutting my hair asked me how I was and I replied that I had been told that I had got just a few more months to live. I could not get another word out of her for the rest of the haircut!

But people’s dread of death does not mean that they do not need to think about it, and that they are not aware that it is where every life ends. To share the hope of eternal life is a wonderful privilege, particularly when it is apparent to the non-believer that it is a reality to you, the believer. I have not done well at sharing this hope, but I am so grateful for opportunities to do it a little more boldly as my own death approaches. I have no excuse for not seizing them.

Resurrection hope

It has been a disappointment to discover how many fellow believers struggle to grasp the strength of our Christian hope. In the early chapters of Acts, as the first Christian sermons were being preached, they put a tremendous emphasis on the resurrection (e.g. Acts 2.24-36; 3.15; 4.2,10; 6.30; 11.39-40; 13.30; 17.2-3,31-32). So much so that, when Paul preached in Athens, they thought he was proclaiming multiple deities — Jesus and Anastasia (= resurrection), Acts 17.18! The resurrection plays a smaller point in contemporary gospel proclamation and that may explain why, with a good few fellow Christians, I think I have seen similar unspoken speech bubbles like the one which I saw over the surgeon’s head when he first broke the news to me. They find it hard to believe that the resurrection to eternal life is a prospect to be welcomed, and, like the pagan world, they assume Christians should dread death and seek to extend life at all costs.

Not seeking healing

I do not think it entirely wrong to seek healing, but I have not particularly wanted that for myself and this has puzzled some. I have not wanted expensive courses of chemotherapy that for me could only have promised an extra few months of life at best. I hope I am not making light of the prospect of death. It is the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15.26) and all Christians shrink naturally from it. But it is ‘the last enemy to be destroyed’ and we are called to live out its destruction in our own lives and deaths as believers. In that famous chapter (1 Corinthians 15) Paul makes it clear that without belief in the resurrection, not only the deaths but also the lives of believers become a travesty. (‘And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men’, verses 17-19).

Here is one area where Christians have a wonderful opportunity to stand out as different from our contemporary culture. Our contemporaries are obsessed with healing and the extension of physical life at all costs. What a pity that we Christians imitate them in that! When we talk about the hope of healing and the relief of physical pain, our contemporaries love it and they flock to our ‘healing services’ with high hopes. But when we talk about glory lying beyond the grave and our sure hope of eternal life, they are brought up short and are forced to face their own eternal destinies.

So it is with Christians as well as non-believers that I have tried to share the good news of resurrection. The warning of my death has brought it into much clearer perspective for me and I regret that I have not proclaimed it much more powerfully through the 37 years of my preaching ministry.

While this period of life is spiritually rich, it is inevitably physically depressing. For 60 years it has been customary for me, if I do not feel well, to go to sleep and know that I will wake up feeling better (or, if I do not, just go back to sleep until I do feel better). But to know now that I will never feel better, that tomorrow will always be a little bit worse than today, is a very different experience.

The knowledge that I have cancer never goes away. I am aware that I am dying every moment of every day, and every waking moment of every night. Each day is new territory for me: will I get up in the morning and find I cannot control my bowels? Or will I suddenly be hit by an unexpected fit of retching in the middle of the day? The trial is knowing that I will never feel ‘better’ again, and that the edge is going from all physical pleasures. For a very different reason from Hamlet, I know what he meant when he said: ‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world’.

How pleasures change

No physical pleasures can any longer please as they once did: food, exercise, rest. Loss of appetite, bad digestion, fatigue, incontinence, cramps and the side-effects of steroids have taken their joys away. Weariness rules and physical pleasures flee. Ecclesiastes 12 is a great reminder to us that this stage of life comes to almost every one: ‘Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, ‘I find no pleasure in them’ (Ecclesiastes 12.1).

Having the pleasure taken out of so many of life’s joyful experiences reminds us that they were all a gift to us in the first place. I never had a right to them. They never belonged to me. And I need to remember the Giver. Ecclesiastes goes on: ‘Remember him — before the silver cord is severed, or the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, or the wheel broken at the well, and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it’ (Ecclesiastes 12.6-7).

All the things of earth will soon be gone forever and I have a sense of savouring some of them especially because of that. I realise it may be the last time I watch a fireworks display or see a particular country view. The added poignancy makes me want to thank God even more for them, and makes me sorry that I have so often taken them for granted.

Personal relationships

But more than all the rich experience of material things on earth, I realise that it is relationships with people that matter most. In October 2009 a kind cousin suggested that he and I revisit the River Cothi in Carmarthenshire, where our family used to fish for some 25 years. As it turned out, I was ill on the dates we had planned for the visit and it had to be cancelled. But a visit to those cousins was still possible later, and I realised that I actually wanted to renew my acquaintance with the cousins far more than I wanted to walk again on the banks of that lovely and exciting river, with its magical memories from my youth. People do matter more than things, and it will be leaving people that will hurt most at death.

There is no question about the savagery of death in this regard. There is no more devastating a barrier in all of human experience than that between the living and the dead. The soft soap and wishful thinking peddled by false prophets in the face of death (that the loved one is ‘just in the next room’, that he’s ‘looking down on us all the time’, that she’ll be ‘invisibly present at every family gathering’) are iniquitous because they fly in the face of all human experience of death, and have no basis in the word of God.

The Bible is clear that ‘it is appointed to man once to die and after that comes judgment’ (Hebrews 9.27, RSV). Every one of us will face up to God to answer for our lives, and every one of us will hang our heads in shame as we realise that we have to be condemned for the way we have lived in God’s world as if it was our own world. But, even as my condemnation is announced, my Redeemer will rise last (Job 19.25), and Jesus will present incontrovertible evidence that my sentence has been fully carried out when he died in my place on the cross. It is my relationship with him that can take me through death and which is the only hope we have of eternal life. He alone is the destroyer of death.

Relationship with God

So, despite the very great strength of human love (Song of Solomon 8.12), it cannot destroy death. There is only one relationship that can do that. And it is the relationship that stands behind all other relationships. In this whole experience I have drawn so much strength from my relationship with my wife (God’s best gift to me after Jesus, and one that has got better and better despite all my sin), and from my relationships with my three children (and three wonderful children-in-law). They have been pillars of spiritual strength to me and I have rejoiced to watch the children grow past me in their faith. Their (and their mother’s) faith has been their greatest gift to me. But then I realise it is not actually their gift to me, but God’s gift to them; and so his gift to me via them. He is the relationship that stands behind all relationships.

So it is in terms of relating to him that I must understand my death. Jesus will be the same — indeed, he will be more real and more true than he has ever been before. It will be his voice that will call me into his presence (1 Thessalonians 4.16). He will himself take me to be with him (John 14.3), so that I may be with him forever (1 Thessalonians 4.17). He is the first and the last (Revelation 1.17-18), the beginning and the end (Revelation 21.6). It has been said that, for the believer, the end of the world is more of a person than it is an event. That is certainly true of the end of life. My death may be the event with which my physical life on earth ends, but it will also be the moment at which my relationship with Jesus becomes complete. That relationship is the only thing that has made sense of my physical life, and at my death it will be everything.

Resurrection’s significance

The first Christian believers were adamant that the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was God’s reversal of the verdict we humans pass on Jesus: ‘…you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him’ (Acts 2.23-24). Men passed their verdict. God reversed it by passing his. Without the resurrection we would not know of that reversal. It was God’s definitive act to approve Jesus’s life and death. It said to everyone, ‘This man is God’s Son and has done what God sent him to do’.

But that was 2,000 years ago, and how can I grasp the resurrection in the same way that they could? If I had been alive then, I could have sat down with an eyewitness and cross-questioned him or her. I can’t do that now. But I do have my own death, asking me the question: is this the end, or not? Am I going out into the night and extermination, making all I have done on earth quite meaningless? Or is there something beyond the grave? Is there a life after life, which will iron out all the deficiencies of our present existence?

My death forces me to face the resurrection of Jesus. No longer is it a bald fact of history for me. It is of crucial significance for every person who faces their own death honestly. Until I am dead, I cannot know what will happen to me after my death. But Jesus has already risen. If I know him now, I will know him then. He is my assurance in dying, and his resurrection is central to Christianity.

We all die as great sinners saved by the great grace of a far greater God. Funeral eulogies rarely present an honest picture of a person’s life. The good is magnified, the bad excluded. But when Christians are remembered as they really were: including their failures and follies, their bad moods and intolerance, their moments of harshness and unkindness, then Christ is made more glorious. For he is the one who has saved us despite our sin; who has loved us even in our weakness. Our salvation is not the record of our deeds on earth, but the intervening action of a loving God, who has saved us despite who we are and what we’ve done. And, if he can save us, then he can save anyone!

Trust in God’s love

That is why it is so important to be realistic and to be biblical about death. In dying, I want to say to those I have loved and to those who have loved me: ‘Don’t magnify me — remember the reality: I was someone who sometimes got you cross, and irritated you, and let you down, and disappointed you, and hurt you. So please don’t remember an imaginary relationship with me. It was good, but it could have been better. I loved you, but I could have loved you better — just as you loved me, but you could have loved me better. So don’t let’s trust in our love for one another. Let’s trust in God’s love for us, so that the change in our relationship which my death will bring can strengthen each of our relationships with Jesus’.

It is my prayer for my family and friends that my death will be for them all a great strengthening and clarifying of their relationship with Jesus. Amen.

Mark Ashton went to be with the Lord on April 3, Easter Saturday. We understand that his last words were, ‘I am nearly home’. We praise God for such a faithful servant of Christ and ask readers to pray for his family and the church at St. Andrew the Great in Cambridge.

On my way to heaven: facing death with Christ will also be available in booklet form from 10ofThose (ISBN 978-1-90617-308-1). Mark wrote it to help Christians facing the final stage of their earthly life and to introduce unbelievers to the hope we can have in Christ. Single copies cost £1.50 each, with discounts available for larger orders: sales@10ofthose.com or 0844 879 3243.