Two days before Christmas, former Nebraska Sen. and University of Florida President Ben Sasse announced he has been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. His tweet was a gut punch to anyone who knows Sasse and to the many around the nation who have admired his presence in public life. A statesman through and through, Sasse embodies an aspirational politics that even those who viscerally disagree with him seem to admire. Well wishes came from across the political divide, as bitter ideological foes united to pledge to pray for a gifted political talent fighting cancer at age 53.
Yet, despite his years of public service, it’s the way Sasse announced his diagnosis that might be his most important contribution to American political life. It reflects the deep and serious theological beliefs that animate the former senator’s life.
“Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence,” he wrote. “But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.” This is the undeniable reality that Christians such as Sasse embrace. Death comes for all of us, and few know when their last breath will be. The New Testament book of James reminds us, “Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:14). To be sure, Christianity isn’t mere nihilism, for believers also understand death to be an intrusion on God’s original created order, the final foe that Christ, in his resurrection, defeated. The Apostle Paul says that the Christian faith allows believers to look at death and say, “Where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15).
Sasse echoes this, attaching his announcement to the season of Advent. “As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.” What’s to come, he says, is the real Christian hope of a new world, a world devoid of the pain and tragedy of this one:
Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in). Nope — often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.” To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient . . . A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears. Such is the calling of the pilgrim. Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment. That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place. But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet. Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective.
To many, this may come across as pie-in-the-sky, a comforting myth that helps you get away from the cold, hard reality of death. But Christians really believe there is another world coming, that this broken reality will give way to a world made right by the one who made it. Christians really believe that because Jesus rose again after his death, we too will rise again, body and soul. This is the hope about which pastor Tim Keller wrote in his final days. It’s what allowed Dietrich Bonhoeffer to whisper, before he was executed by the Nazi government, “This is the end, but for me it is the beginning of life.”
The hope of the eternal doesn’t erase the reality of cancer in a fallen world. True Christian hope is not flippant about death. The 11th chapter of the Gospel of John tells the story of Jesus, standing before the rotted corpse of his friend Lazarus, weeping and overcome with rage. Christian theology teaches that death is an aberration, an intrusion into God’s good creation, the work of an unseen enemy. It is an attack against God himself, who fashioned humans in his image. Even the most devout Christian doesn’t welcome a terminal diagnosis, doesn’t shrug when loved ones are taken early. Because we see humans as God sees them, we are repulsed by death, sickened by violence, and must be defenders of human life.
Sasse rightly pledged to fight his cancer and we should all pray that God, through the human instruments of advanced medicine, heals his body and gives him many more years. Death isn’t natural—to fight death with the materials of God’s creation—is the natural thing. Yet, the inevitability of what comes for us can be faced with an otherworldly kind of joy.
Christians have a hope that can be “rubbed into” our sorrow and anger the way salt is rubbed into meat. Neither stifling grief nor giving way to despair is right. Neither repressed anger nor unchecked rage is good for your soul. But pressing hope into your grief makes you wise, compassionate, humble, and tenderhearted. Grieve fully yet with profound hope!
The Christian resists a culture of death–a cheapening of human life through violence of any form–yet accepts as reality that Christ, in his life, death, and resurrection, has defeated it and offers himself as a promise of new and eternal life.
This is why Sasse, the college professor, might be offering the world perhaps his greatest lesson: how to face the prospect of death well. Sasse, whose discourses on civics on the Senate floor still inspire and whose books on American cultural maladies are widely read, is now offering his life as a template for millions of Americans who might walk a similar path.
Nobody, including Sasse, chooses to sign up for such suffering. Nobody would, as Sasse wrote, want to think that they may miss the milestones of life. Even among believers, few, if any, among us understand the complex mysteries of a God who allows cancer to take hold of some of our best people in the prime of life. Yet, such a sober reality can help clear the mind and focus the heart on the things that really matter. It can give us a gratitude for each day we are granted, for the little blessings we overlook. Our petty disagreements, our nonstop partisan bickering, our junior-high level social media dramas seem to melt away when faced with our own mortality.
Sasse’s thoughtful announcement comes at a time when Americans have few models of suffering well. On the one hand, tech entrepreneurs publicly muse about transhumanist utopias, where the body is mere hardware to be upgraded and extended indefinitely. On the other hand, there is the advancing Orweillian horror of “death with dignity,” where the sterile answer to a less-than-ideal life is no life at all. Governors in New York and Illinois recently signed expansive legislation that mirrors Canada’s expanding Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) regime.
To fight against cancer with joy and hope, to suffer well in the face of his own mortality, is a kind of counter to these insidious social movements that seek to deny our humanity. And Sasse offers the rest of us the perspective we need to live with purpose for however many days we have left on this earth.
As a middle-aged man not much younger than the former senator, I read his words with much grief. I wondered how I’d face a similar future, with my own children in high school and college. I wept, not only for him and his family, but for an America that desperately needs his voice.
Yet I was inspired by a man who, facing the worst days of his life, is meeting them with true Christian hope and joy. I’m moved by a husband and father who will fight this disease with courage and yet will cling to the Christian hope of the life to come. In facing death so publicly, Sasse may teach us, if we listen, how to really live.
