Dear Friends,
The death of Peter Smedley will be the first assisted suicide to be shown on terrestrial television in this country, in a documentary called Choosing to Die. It seems to be part of a steadily mounting campaign in the media to make assisted suicide legal.
It is sadly ironic that death should be chosen or embraced. After all, death entered the world as God’s judgment on human sin (“sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin” – Romans 5:12, NIV). Death is not a good thing, but something to be cried out against. To be precise, it is not death itself which is being chosen by someone like Mr Smedley, but rather an earlier less painful death over a later more painful one.
It is, though, a very sad thing when anyone should choose to die. The sad thing is that they do it to be happier, or at least less miserable – they think they will be better off dead than alive. There’s not nearly enough space for me here to go into all the issues involved with this. But the only person who is better off dead than alive is the person who dies as a Christian. For that person, “to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). Our death can only be ‘gain’ (life with Christ for ever) because Jesus himself chose to die for our sins – not to make things easier for him, but to bring us to glory.
Chris Hobbs.
Vicar.