A Christian Attitude toward Death

A Christian Attitude toward Death

The Fifth Sunday in Lent March 9, 2008

Today’s lessons paint a picture of the certainty of death and the promise that life can be eternal, that death is not the end of all life.

Many years ago I lead an adult forum for a couple of weeks using a video series called, “Before Death Happens.” As someone who has to deal with the reality of death, I was surprised by the negative reactions to this presentation. In one video clip, the speaker visits a funeral home, including a walk through the embalming room, and talks about important decisions concerning our deaths that we can make for ourselves or leave to others to guess.

The reaction of some people was about the same it would have been if I had shown a pornographic film. Apparently shocked, a few told me in no uncertain terms that this was not the kind of thing they wanted to see on Sunday mornings.

We live in a society that avoids contact with death as much as possible. Many people, when faced with certain death, refuse to talk about it with family or clergy. Decades ago Ernst Becker wrote The Denial of Death in which he lays out in detail how the human fear of death has motivated most of our human strivings. We build our Babylonian towers of achievement to cheat death of its victory.

An old cartoon from the New Yorker shows a man sitting in a doctor’s office being examined. “Please, Doc—nothing too aggressive,” he says. “I’m kind of attached to my symptoms.” Our symptoms, our habitual ways of denying death, are well known and comfortable. They are such comfort that they allow us to resist thinking about death deeply enough to be open to risky alternatives.

Ezekiel was preaching to an exiled people. The elite of the Jewish nation was taken to Babylon after Jerusalem was sacked and burned. Though “they sat down and wept” as one of the psalms says, many also adapted to their new life there. In fact, many prospered while in exile. The prospect of returning to a ruined city, even if it was their parents’ home, competed against the comfort they had attained amid the pagan temples of Babylon. Some of the dead bones to whom Ezekiel was sharing his vision did not consider themselves dead.

One commentator has written: Like the exiles in Babylon, we try to numb the spiritual pain by making life more comfortable. We work hard. We collect a lot of things. We buy houses, plant our roots, live quietly and try to make Babylon as nice as we can. But however nicely we decorate it, Babylon is still not our home. And the day we deaden our longing for God is the day we spiritually die. Then the rest of us begins to slowly die, from the inside out. [Craig Barnes, Christian Century, February 27, 2002]

What should the Christian stance toward death be? I once had a zealous relative who was newly “born again.” He told his young daughters that he would rather be with God in heaven that on earth with them. This was not a loving statement to make! Even if he thought he was paraphrasing St. Paul, his attitude was not what I would call a proper Christian view of death.

It seems to me that the Christian attitude should be somewhat ambivalent—or balanced. On the one hand, we should acknowledge death as an enemy of God, as did Jesus. In the midst of today’s long Gospel lesson, we encounter the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept” in older translations.

Why did Jesus weep? Was it out of grief for the loss of his dear friend, Lazarus? Perhaps, but his crying happens directly before he shouts, “Lazarus, come out!” Was he unsure of his own ability to resuscitate Lazarus? Or were his tears those of compassion? Tears first for Mary and Martha in their suffering. And then for the suffering of the world which includes death and our denial and fear of it. Jesus knew that this suffering would continue until the end of time.

But were his tears also for himself? Jesus says that his actions of raising Lazarus are to show forth the glory of God. Immediately after this, we hear the Jewish official plotting the death of Jesus. He is upsetting the order, the symptoms of death to which we become accustomed. "What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on thus, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation." [John 11: 47b-48]

Jesus said he raised Lazarus to show forth God’s glory. “Glory” in John’s vocabulary means first the cross, Jesus being raised up in glory on the cross and only then raised up in glory in the resurrection. Jesus was doomed to Calvary by resuscitating Lazarus. Were his tears a Gethsemane moment for him during which his human fears shook him to the core?

Well, we can only speculate about this brief show of emotion, but one thing is clear: Jesus continues to see death as the enemy, the crown of sin in the world.

Dylan Thomas’ well-known poem addresses this combative attitude toward death:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It is all right then for us to fight against death. For Jesus did combat with death through his many healings and his raising of Lazarus and others. Life on this earth is meant to be good. God’s creation is not yet finished. There is much to be done.

On the other hand, we need to have hope in the midst of the inevitability of death. We do believe that our life in God has an eternal aspect, that this is a gift from God to all who believe. This truth is very difficult to fathom and to embrace, especially when death comes knocking at our door or at our loved ones’ doors.

“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” asks Jesus of the mourners at Lazarus’ tomb, as he asks us still.

I’m not sure how or why God can draw us beyond death into an eternal loving relationship. But I do know that we are called forth to witness to an eternal life that is not dependent upon earthly life and death.

Eugene O’Neill wrote a not very successful play called Lazarus Laughed. Toward the end of the play, Lazarus says this: The grave is as empty as a doorway is empty. It is a portal through which we move into greater and finer life. Therefore, there is nothing to fear. Our great agenda is to learn to accept, to learn to trust. We are put here to learn to love more fully. There is only life. There is no death." And with that his laughter began to fill the whole house in which he was staying. [Cited by John Claypool, “Easter and the Fear of Death” on “30 Good Minutes,” March 30, 1997]

I don’t live all the time in such a joyfully hopeful space as did O’Neill’s Lazarus. But it is a place I always long for. It is my sure and certain hope.

I think that we Christians are justified in having this ambivalent or balanced view of death. As C. S. Lewis has written: “Because we love something else more than this world, we love even this world better than those who know no other.”

Let us continue to rage against the enemy death, all the while having a sure and certain hope that through God’s grace there is no death, only life.

The Rev. Taylor Moore St. Peter’s Episcopal Church Oxford, Mississippi