Jesus’s dialogue with a group of Jewish followers in John 8 is not going well, and the next thing he is about to say isn’t going to improve the mood of the conversation.
“Very truly, I tell you, whoever keeps my word will never see death,” he tells his listeners. “Now we know you have a demon,” they respond. They point out that even the great Abraham, the father of the covenant between God and the Israelites, died.
They were missing the point. Physical death for all of us is inevitable. It is built into the design of creation. On Ash Wednesday, we are reminded of the words of Genesis 3:19: You are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Spiritual death—disconnection from the grace and love of God—is not inevitable. “Whoever keeps my word” by entering into that sacred cycle of loving God, others and self will indeed never taste death. That’s the message echoed in the climactic ending of Romans 8: “Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Jesus did not say we would never see hard times, including that hardest of times when mortality writes the last sentence of our lives on earth. But once we embrace Jesus as the son of God, we will never find ourselves outside of God’s family.