Macabre things have been in the news this week. There has been the gruesome discovery of bits of a child’s body in different bin bags scattered over an area; the body of Myra Hindley has been cremated and that has raked over a very disturbing past. On Wednesday night I finished working quite late and it usually takes me an hour or so to unwind before I can think about going to sleep. I found myself channel hopping and landed on Channel 4 just as they were showing the first live post-mortem in Britain for 170 years.

Professor Gunther von Hagens has a very macabre art form. He plastinates the dead bodies of people, which involves a process the more squeamish among us will not want to hear about. There is an exhibition of his work at the moment in the East End of London, not far from where Jack the Ripper carried out his crimes that shocked Victorian London. An interesting juxtaposition.

There are different levels we can take this post-mortem at. One is to join with the medical ethicists who thought it to be a macabre spectacle, showmanship of a bizarre nature, and it certainly struck me like that. But as I watched the body being cut open and vital organs beneath the surface being removed I found myself reflecting on what we are as people.

On one level all human beings are reduced to this cadaverous state. It reminded me of a 15th century tomb monument in Canterbury Cathedral to Archbishop Chichele which shows the Archbishop in all his regalia lying peacefully and in state on the top. Underneath is a carving of the naked corpse, stripped of all finery. It is meant to make the great and the humble alike reflect on their mortality and their ultimate nakedness before God. Whatever trappings we cover ourselves with, whatever pomp and ceremony we build up to aggrandize ourselves or others, be they leaders or celebrities, all of us can and will be reduced to this! Even disturbing art can make us think.

Does it matter how we treat the bodies of the dead? Does it make any difference to anything? This is not an arbitrary question. Earlier this year I buried some retained organs 20 years after the child died. Well we call them organs, but they were actually slides and blocks, tissue samples taken from organs. I am someone who doesn’t like seeing skeletons in museum showcases and rather think they should have been reburied near where they were found.

On one level God will sort out whatever mess we make of things. Salvation does not to us depend on all our body parts being in tact. To orthodox and strict Muslims and Jews they need to be buried whole. So whenever you hear of a bomb explosion on a bus in Palestine or Israel, there will be a Rabbi or Imam collecting up the parts so that as much of them can be buried as possible. Amputees will be given the removed limb for later burial.

We are more than the sum total of our vital organs. That squidgy cauliflower-like substance that is our brain produces a startling level of consciousness and comprehension. And I just find it incomprehensible to think that we are just the accidental product of some cosmic freak event that produced a world so finely balanced that intelligent life could emerge. Having all our bits when we are laid to rest or cremated seems to rather miss the point of life. At the same time, pictures are important to us and we are so closely associated with the body that to treat that with contempt is to treat the person with contempt. Plastinating and using a post death medical examination as a freaky show seems to me to treat human life as nothing more than the sum total of the body’s parts and I find that disturbing.

Our human needs pre-death were the subject of our Gospel reading this morning (Matt 25:31-46). On a day when we celebrate the Kingdom of God, when we celebrate the image of Christ as King, we are given a very human set of scenarios. The test in this parable involves quenching thirst, welcoming strangers, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, visiting prisoners. We can argue over the best way to do this in an urbanised society where we are talking about caring for millions, not just those we can name within a pre-industrialised village. Questions of dependency culture and people slipping through the net naturally come to mind. But the concerns of our flesh, of our living tissue and its needs are brought to the forefront of our minds today.

There is probably a closer relationship than we might think between how we treat the living and how we treat the dead. Some of course treat the dead with such an exalted state that it makes me wonder how much guilt, justified or not, is being played out. But if we don’t care much about clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, visiting prisoners, caring for the sick, we won’t be bothered much how we treat them when they have died. If we are prepared to make human bodies into freaky works of art, or just cut them up for public entertainment, then it is not a massive step to lose sight of the sanctity that is life.

Medical research and storage of samples can be ethically justified where there is a recognition that these are parts of people who lived. We navigate a close path here. On the one hand our ultimate salvation is not affected one jot by part of our organs sitting on a shelf in the basement of a hospital pathology department. A person is properly buried and commended to God with or without these bits. At another level people get rightly concerned and deeply upset if they feel that the sanctity that is life has been treated with contempt and it seems to me that this is the issue with retained organs or tissue samples of organs. Plastination, whether with informed consent or not, seems to me to cross a line that as a society we should be concerned about.

Celebrating Christ as King is both the proclamation of an other-worldly reality and hope, and it is also, as we see from our gospel, grounded in some very this-worldly concerns.

© Ian Black 2002

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