Death at the Center

I’ve been thinking about death a fair bit lately. It’s not something I usually do, surrounded as I am by an over abundance of life. The mind doesn’t often turn to death when there are so many little people all around, and a puppy. But on the farther reaches of the mind, it is always there.

It was in reading and thinking about the people killed in last few weeks, in California and Colorado and Paris and Mali, that I began to try to sort out the importance of the dead. Here in the west, we quickly get to know the names of those who are suddenly and unexpectedly snatched out of a network of relationships, so that everyone left here has to scramble to recover life without that person. We work very hard, in life, to keep death in its proper place, not overwhelming the living. When lots and lots of people die, and then die so that we never know their names nor even their faces, it’s like the lapping at the shore of a vast sea–you can’t emotionally assimilate it from where you are standing. The grief laps up over your toes and then you walk away, unknowing. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, as the body count mounts, the grief is a vaster and greater wave, the fabric of relationships torn, rent asunder.

The fact that we are all going to die, each and every one of us, should, I thought for a bit, be some kind of comfort. It should make death into no big deal. It should lessen the anxiety and sadness. Whether a person dies as a child, or in old age, in peace or in degradation violence, it should all be one. All go down to death, so we should not stand back in fear, unable to face the moment when it comes. As in Adam all dying should make the dying an unexceptional reality. Except that it doesn’t. Since the dawn of time, each person dying, one by one, does nothing to lessen the sorrow of the moment when a person you know actually does, nor the anxious worry over the hour of your own death. Whatever the moment of death, for whatever person, it is always a great chasm of darkness, of loss.

Yesterday a person died who I have not seen for years and years and years. It wasn’t a person who was intimately connected to my current existence. It wasn’t a person I had drawn very close to to understand and know. Rather, he as more like a landmark, a fixture, someone whose continued existence and living provided my worldview with order and peace. My connection to him was that he would always be there, because that’s the way the world works. Can you tell that I knew first him when I was a child?

His death immediately and catastrophically connected itself to all the other deaths of people I know–people who stood like pillars in this life, stones of strength against whom I could bash in my efforts to cling on to life. As they have died, my landscape is left plundered and forsaken. I look out and don’t know what life should look like because they aren’t there.

I wandered around yesterday knocked back on my heels with grief, trying to understand what sort of sorrow this might be. As people age, you should be able to prepare yourself for the hour of death, it shouldn’t be that you go from room to room, weeping, because, after all, it happens to everyone.

Which is why I am a Christian. Because death is at the center of the picture. Death isn’t something that has to be explained along with a lot of other points of doctrine and theology. It is at the very center of human history, human understanding, human existence. Death is the ground over which we walk, the thing that we chose to cling to, the sure and certain constant that units all human existence together. As in Adam all die, by choice, because that’s what we wanted, even though we can’t look at it or admit it, or face it, or anything.

And God, who offered the choice, knowing it would be taken, understood what the consequence would be, for himself. He didn’t walk away, or obliterate it and start over, he entered the picture, he grabbed onto that one sure and certain constant, he lay back on the hard wood of the cross and willingly gave up his own self to death, not shrinking back, not retreating from the chasm of Sheol, and died. God himself came and died, as every single one of us will do.

He is the first one to acknowledge the strength and power of the grave. And his friends reeled back, bitter with shock and grief, hidden in the darkness of hopelessness, unable to believe it had gone that way. If you have ever been locked in your closet, or your bed, or alone in your car, looking at a wasteland of life plundered by death, you have been with the disciples in those hours.

Jesus dying, for us, is such an extraordinary truth. Of course, when he died, death had to begin to unravel. God cannot walk in the way that we have chosen for ourselves, and not break it apart by the power of his very existence. His life is too big, too strong, to be overcome by death. He is the stone, the pillar, against which all other human stones crack and break, so that he is the only one left standing.

As in Adam all die, in Jesus, those who fasten themselves to his strength, his life, his very person, shall be made alive. Those whose names are known to lots of people, those who die before they are given a name, those who die and only Jesus knows their name, in him they are made alive.

At the center of my broken landscape, standing stark against my grief, is the cross. If I have clung to the strength of people along the way, or banged up against them, it has only been possible for me to do this because they themselves were clinging on to Jesus, their strength was already only his. So, I will pick myself and go on, and rejoice in the midst of sorrow, that the one who died overcame death.