We aren’t just afraid of death. We struggle to recognize what role death plays in our lives and sense of value.
Episode 20 of the Make Saints podcast: “Death”
Here in Indiana, as I’m recording this for you, spring has sprung. The high is going to be 72 today. Trees are blooming. The world is looking fresh and exciting and new. Those cold, winter days are behind us.
I, for one, am feeling thankful for this season. It feels like we’ve been down, tired, locked inside and now the sun is trying to come out, drawing us out to join it.
Nothing says life like spring.
Which is also why, those of us who are Christian, have to first talk about death.
Death
It may be spring, and flowers may be starting to bloom, and we may be super eager to talk about it being “Easter time”. But…something happens before Easter. And we all know what that is.
I did not grow up in a tradition that spent any time talking about “the blood of the lamb.” We never shied away from talking about the Crucifixion of Jesus on the day we call “Good Friday” (which is about the most poetically premodern and postmodern name for the day, by the way—but man do modernists hate it). We definitely talked about it plenty. Just not obsessively.
We also didn’t paint Jesus’s death as somehow good either. We didn’t celebrate the dying in any way.
Part of this is because I come from a WASPy tradition in which that junk is unseemly.
And partly because the theology behind this junk is complicated.
So we talked about it as a way to avoid it.
We don’t want people to think that dying is good. We also want to affirm that Jesus’s death was also somehow necessary. Just without all the other baggage around it.
For many of us, keeping it simple was enough. But that doesn’t satisfy everybody. Especially when we aren’t clear on what it is we are actually affirming.
The word church nerds use to talk about the necessity of Jesus’s death is atonement. I’ll save all of that for another day. But the purpose of atonement is to name the purpose of Jesus’s death and resurrection. To answer the essential questions of Why did Jesus die? and What is the metaphysical significance of his death?
Atonement is how we get to such arguments that Jesus had to die to satisfy a debt or that Jesus’s death saved us from sin. Again, I really don’t want to follow that rabbit trail, as inviting as it is, but please hear me when I say that these arguments have been debated among Christians from the beginning. And we have never fully agreed on it.
And it is precisely that reason that the church seeks to publicly and unequivocally affirm that something happens and that his death was also somehow necessary. But without going any further.
We want to affirm the part we all agree on.
We just don’t agree on the cause.
Because getting into the cause makes it all too complicated. And again, we don’t agree. In fact, it may be the thing we agree on the least of anything!
Here’s a personal example as a sort of reverse illustration.
One of my kids did something they knew was wrong. Spent some money that wasn’t theirs to spend.
They also didn’t really understand how money works. And especially had no sense of proportion.
As parents, we could choose to focus only on the fact that they did something wrong. Punish them. Make them feel bad. Demand it never be done again. In other words, make this one thing the essential terms for everything.
But when then do they learn?
Not just about right and wrong, but why this was a violation and all the other stuff that goes with it.
We could tie their thinking to a specific trigger without helping them understand the context.
The problem for Christians who talk glowingly about the Crucifixion and for those that don’t is that neither choice gives us a chance to talk about death authentically. As the thing we fear. And the source of intense pain.
We so often talk about the death of Jesus like it is something too painful to talk about or else some distorted mirror reality in which his death is good, but every other death is bad…for reasons.
What is missing from both of these is a deep sense of the context. And what really happens to our belief. In other words, how are we supposed to learn from this?
Unsatisfied
While my tradition is always eager to affirm that the death of Jesus is both necessary and tragic, not everybody is satisfied with that answer. Some want to drill down and get more specific. Others want to throw away the traditional affirmation altogether.
I’m not satisfied with any of it. It all strikes me as, again, another rhetorical exercise in seeking uniformity where there is none to be found.
Because death sucks. It always has.
Dying sucks.
Die quickly in an accident? It sucks.
Die after a long-drawn out life with cancer? It sucks.
Death is the worst.
Actually, that’s not true.
Not dying can be way worse.
Something that sucks worse than death? Dementia. The living get to say goodbye to the spirit long before the body. It’s like having a loved one die twice. That really sucks.
Authors have long explored the problem of immortality: of watching everything else die. It is a very different kind of pain. To know everything else changes but you don’t get to.
Veterans come home and share the pain of surviving. While we’re celebrating that they came home alive, many vets feel guilt and shame for not dying. And most of us, including many other veterans, can’t even begin to help them.
Because we imagine that the opposite of “dying” is not actually “living”, but a rhetorical concept of life that is unchanging.
Immortality, or if you like, eternal life, is most often seen as getting to be about 25 years old—forever. And not just locked in at an age, but locked in with those memories and experiences. We don’t actually account for learning, adapting, and changing. We want to be the same.
And moreover, many of us see it as behind us, so we wish to relive it or regain it. So that we can reexperience it now.
In other words, there is something we fear more than death: living.
To live we must die.
Philosophers and theologians have laid this out for us all too well. That living is impossible without death. We can’t experience joy if it is perpetual and always increasing.
Science has also made this clear. Adaptation and growth is necessary to the thriving of a species. And that we are always either growing or declining. In the end, we will all die.
But rather than see death as a necessarily negative concept, we’re called by our faith and our experience to see it as transitory.
Death leads to new life.
The story of the death and resurrection of Jesus isn’t the origin story of our creation. It is the embodiment of creation.
Life is created, lives, dies, and begets new life. That is the natural order. It is also the fundamental character of Christian theology. That so many Christians misunderstand that doesn’t make that fact any less true. It just means we suck at teaching.
So, while we shouldn’t cheer for death, we must be willing to see beyond it. To the life that it creates. To the new hope that it brings. Opportunities we all have to reinvent and restore and become.
Because death is never the end of life. It is its beginning.