Never to die anymore—that might well be the worst that could ever happen to a human being.  If that ever came to pass, a human life would never be able to renew itself.  When a life is fulfilled, death comes as a liberator.  When you are weak and infirm, when the burden of the years and cares becomes unbearable, death is the greatest benefactor who bestows another form of life on us.

Finally, the dying person is redeemed from suffering, freed out of the prison of the body.  Sometimes this liberation shows itself even visibly.  After the death throes the deceased leaves its traces on the face—an expression of rest and nobility that you don’t find anywhere but in death.  Finally freed from the burden of life.

When Christ died, something else happened—completely different from the death of every human being.  Long before His death on the cross, He announced His path already with the prediction: “The Son of Man will be for three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”  The heart of the earth has a sting, which is death.  Its lord and master?  It is the prince of darkness.

Christ did not wage the worst battle on the earth, but in the heart of the earth—to vanquish death from the inside, to heal the heart of the earth.

Since His death, each human being who seeks Him can die differently—no longer imprisoned in the heart of the earth, but secure in the heart of Christ, where each who has sought Him has a home.

Christ was not committed to the earth like mortal remains.  He laid Himself into the earth to renew His creation—as a seed that lets blossom the whole earth.

Rev. Bastiaan Baan, Easter 2025

In the months of the life of Christ that led up to Golgotha, what will take place there sounds again and again.  Christ Himself foresees His future.  Three times He proclaims the way He is to go: See, we are going up to Jerusalem.  And everything foretold in the books of the prophets will be fulfilled on the Son of Man.

But the dead know it too.  During the Transfiguration on the mountain, Moses and Elijah appear.  Luke writes: “They spoke of the fulfillment that His earthly life was about to reach in Jerusalem,” literally, about His ex-hodos, His going-out.  Why is Jerusalem mentioned all the time?

Jerusalem means: City of Peace.  If there is one city in the world that is torn apart by fighting, it surely is Jerusalem.  Even today it is a bone of contention of peoples and religions.  Countless times, the city has been destroyed and built up again.  Under thick layers of sand and stones lie the remnants of destroyed and ruined cultures.  And thus it will probably continue to go in the future.

With foresight, Christ chose this city as the place of His entry and of His exodus.  Gently, seated on a donkey, He enters the city of peace that has become a city of strife, as if he wanted to say with this entry:

I create a way up in the way down
I create life in death
I create peace in violence
I go with you on the long way from the old to the New Jerusalem, the City of Peace.

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, April 13, 2025

When we read about the countless healings in the Gospels, sooner or later the question will arise: why at that time, and not today?

Just like at that time, when Jesus was living on the earth, there are lots of sick people in our time, bent and weak, deformed, paralyzed, possessed—and no one is able to heal them as if by magic. Jesus, however, only needed to look to come to a diagnosis at first glance, give a therapy, and bring about the healing of body, soul, and spirit. For that reason it was said of Him: “He has taken our sickness from us; He has borne all our infirmities.” (Matthew 8:17)

But now? Is He still healing? Or is He leaving us alone with our illnesses? Or are we so hardened and ill that He cannot reach us anymore? Or are we now supposed to bear our illnesses and weaknesses ourselves?

When you wonder how in the world in which we now live Christ deals with our illnesses and weaknesses, the Consecration of the Human Being has a very different answer to these questions. “Sickness of sin” is what the altar service calls the illness we all suffer from. That is an illness that has left its traces in the corporeality of humanity. In our Creed, it seems as if the sickness of sin was already healed by the spirit with the birth of Jesus. Only, that is no healing by magic, neither is it a healing from one day to the next, but hope for a far future. “They may hope for the overcoming of the sickness of sin…” says the promise of the Creed.

We may be ever so sick when we stand before the altar, the medicine that makes whole can permeate us so that in the core of our being we become perfectly healthy—even if we are mortally ill. This is why from the earliest days of Christianity the meal of bread and wine was called pharmakon athanasias, meaning medicine of immortality.

When we then, strengthened by the medicine that makes whole, pass from life into death, He will say also to us: “You are released from your illness.”

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, February 23, 2025

Many people, perhaps even all of us, have a deeply rooted tendency to judge other people by their outer appearance.  When we walk through a city, we look all the time either with sympathy or antipathy at people and pass judgments.  We haven’t even really seen them, spoken with them, met them, and we have our judgments ready, read off their clothes, their outer get-up, facial expression—all those fleeting impressions that can’t really tell us anything essential.

Imagine how God looks at these people.  What does He see?  The proverb says: For God all human beings are equal.  That is almost unimaginable for us.  His love is not limited to a little bunch of favorites.  Every creature bears a precious treasure, even if it is hidden far away or perhaps even buried.  In spite of this, every human being can dig up this hidden treasure and bring it to light.  For God it makes no difference whether it is a gift from rich talents or from deep poverty.  Even when I think: I have nothing—I can still offer Him the present moment.

We try to do that at the altar: to be totally present, from moment to moment.  And although we never completely succeed in this, God sees our efforts.  For each single moment can become a royal gift for Him, offered from our pure thinking, our loving heart, our willing devotion.

That is why for God all human beings are equal, because in each of us slumbers a hidden king with a hidden treasure.

–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, January 16, 2025