There’s an article in the New Yorker (via Tim Challies) about euthanasia in Belgium. The main story of the article is a man looking for answers to what happened to his mother, who suffered from depression all her life and in the end committed doctor-assisted suicide. The story is both heartbreaking and troubling. Troubling, for all the baggage that comes with euthanasia and because it portrays a society careening down a road to self-destruction. Heartbreaking because of the woman and her son. She found no help in modern psychiatry, only useless platitudes. Her son has found no answers. Sadly, neither does he appear to have philosophical foundations to mount an argument against the secular idea of a human being as Autonomous Self-fulfillment Machine.

But what got me really thinking was Luke 7:36-50, my Bible reading for the day, which I picked up immediately after reading the New Yorker article. What a powerful contrast it is. A woman with no hope comes to Jesus, braving the scorn of all the best of her society. He receives her with grace, gives her dignity with his response to the leaders, and deals with the reality of her sin (which Luke declines to identify) not by brushing it off, but with forgiveness. Jesus is who the Belgian lady needed. And all her enlightened secular society could offer was…death. So sad.

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life and have it to the full” (John 10:10)