‘We’re All on the Clock’: Ben Sasse on Death, Faith and Hope
(ANALYSIS) It's the question believers have asked for centuries when wars threaten nations, storms ravage cities and diseases strike loved ones: "Why, oh God, why?"
Former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, 53, elected not to ask that question in an X post just before Christmas that said: "I'll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.
“Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it's a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do. I'm blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers. As one of them put it, 'Sure, you're on the clock, but we're all on the clock.' Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all.”
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Sasse served as a Republican senator from 2015 until his resignation in 2023, when he became president of the University of Florida. He left that job in July 2024, after his wife, Melissa, was diagnosed with epilepsy, while also wrestling with memory issues.
Before reaching the Senate, Sasse taught at the University of Texas, served in the Department of Health and Human Services for President George W. Bush and was president of Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska. Sasse has a Yale University doctorate in history and has written bestsellers such as “The Vanishing American Adult.”
The timing of the Sasse announcement was more than symbolic, said Daniel Darling, director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Sasse noted that he was writing at the end of the Advent season, with its message of Christmas hope for this life and the next.
“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," wrote Darling in The Dispatch. "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.”
Thus, Sasse's letter is important in an age in which "tech entrepreneurs publicly muse about transhumanist utopias," and some politicos embrace "the advancing (Orwellian) horror of 'death with dignity.'"
As a historian, Sasse is "offering the world perhaps his greatest lesson. ... 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,” wrote Darling.
“Yet, such a sober reality can help clear the mind and focus the heart on the things that really matter. ... Our petty disagreements, our nonstop partisan bickering, our junior-high level social media dramas seem to melt away when faced with our own mortality.”
Choosing his words carefully, Sasse noted that “hope” is not a vague “optimism” linked to “Hallmark-sappy spirituality” or “a bootstrapped hope in our own strength.”
While optimism is good, “it's not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you're not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pops they're gonna bury their son. ... 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.”
Journalist Nancy French, author of “Ghosted: An American Story,” noted that Sasse has been candid when writing about hard challenges in life and the reality of death. Thus, she had appreciated his "memento mori” — Latin for “remember you will die” — warnings even before her own 2023 breast cancer diagnosis.
Sasse has “always dealt with the reality he had versus the one he wished he had,” French wrote on X. Thus, in his book “Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal,” Sasse stressed that the Lord's Prayer teaches: “We're to focus on wanting what God wants — may His Name be hallowed, not mine; His Will be advanced, not mine. ... But I want the whole future to be solved, now, put to bed! No, Jesus says. Ask simply to live more faithfully in the here and now.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.