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A Christian's view of death
Hubert J. Richards

 

Theologians hesitate to write about death. They tend to be regarded as theological funeral directors. This can command respectful awe. But it can also give rise to suppressed mirth. On the stage, and in stories, jokes and songs, the lugubrious mortician has been regularly regarded, throughout man's history, as good for a laugh. Even an amateur psychologist can identify the reason for this: we make fun (among other things) of what we cannot face. What the undertaker stands for — dying, death and decomposition — is too painful for us to contemplate. So we turn to laughter to dissolve our anxiety and, for a time anyway, exorcize the unwelcome guest.

INTO THE UNKNOWN

"If the rich could hire the poor to die for them, the poor could make a good living." The rueful Yiddish proverb accurately points to the universal fear of death, even among those who otherwise enjoy a strong sense of security.

Deep down we all dread death. Not necessarily the actual process of dying which, in the event, if only out of sheer exhaustion, can be a time of comparative calm. What is feared is rather the concept of death, the prospect of life being cut short and coming to an end.

This fear is something quite distinct from the natural resistance to death common to all living beings, which ensures that life goes on against all expectations to the contrary. Even the most inexperienced gardener has discovered this astonishing life force in his battle against weeds. The dread of death lies at a different level, and is more akin to the child's fear of the dark and the unknown. As they grow, some learn to cope with these fears better than others; our sense of security is totally dependent on the environment and upbringing we have enjoyed or been denied. But no one can ever entirely rid himself of the apprehension that is instinc¬tively felt in the face of anything unknown, least of all of something as totally unknown as death. Each man faces his coffin with the sort of feelings motorists know as they reach the traffic signal at the crossroad: "Do not enter this box unless your exit is clear." His exit is not clear. He can't see that far, and he enters the box with some trepidation.

Some people refuse to admit this fear. This may itself be an indication of how deepseated their fear really is: it is so threatening that it cannot be allowed to come to the surface. To acknowledge it would be to be overwhelmed by it. So they claim that they are resigned to the inevitability of death, or even that they accept it with equanimity. Some turn the tables com¬pletely and speak of their longing for death. The life they have experienced is not worth living, and they are happy to trade it in, even if they get nothing in return. It is revealing that such a death-wish is still regarded in law as evidence of an unsound mind. The treatment accorded to them has made their life more absurd, and therefore more fearful, than death itself.

There are others who, while they honestly admit their fear of death, are ashamed of it. For them, fear is synonymous with cowardice, and they feel it incumbent on them, at least for the sake of others, to hide the panic that grips them at the thought of death. Worst of all, they feel that such dread is un-Christian. To acknowledge it openly would be to deny what they imagine their faith demands of them — a patient accept¬ance of death, or at least a stiff upper lip. Countless Christian sermons have assured them of this, and Christian hymn-writers have vied with each other to put it to music:

Away with our sorrow and fear!
We soon shall recover our home.
(Charles Wesley)

But timorous mortals start and shrink
To cross this narrow sea,
And linger, shivering on the brink,
And fear to launch away.
(Isaac Watts)

When I tread the verge of Jordan,
Bid my anxious fears subside.
(William Williams)

Why should I shrink at pain and woe,
Or feel, at death, dismay?
(Joseph Bromehead)

The language is so much at variance with what the normal person feels in the face of death that one might be forgiven for suspecting that the hymn-writers were never in the presence of a real death, least of all that of the founder of Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth. After all, the New Testament records do not represent him as facing his agony with equanimity; they speak of the sweat coming off him as if he was bleeding. They describe him, in one of the New Testament's most moving pages, as:
feeling our weaknesses with us,
tempted in every way that we are...
he can sympathize with those who are uncertain
because he too lived in the limitations of weakness...
During his life on earth
he offered up prayer and entreaty,
aloud and in silent tears,
to the one who had the power to save him out of death.
(Hebrews 4:15-5:7)

Mark and Matthew even speak of him as breathing his last with a cry so desperate that Luke, a rather less robust readership in mind, felt the need to moderate it to something less shocking:
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? (Mark 15:34)

Would Wesley and Watts have reproached Jesus too as a timorous mortal, and made encouraging noises to jolly him along? If Jesus faced death with anguish and fear, why should his followers expect to get by less lightly, or feel ashamed that the prospect of that great unknown makes them sweat too?

FINALITY OF DEATH

One of the ways in which people try to cope with their open or secret fear of death is to pretend it is not really death at all. What happens at the end is not really an end but the beginning of something else. The dying person does not really die, he falls asleep for a while in order to wake up again later. The disintegration which he is undergoing will not really do any permanent damage, it is only temporary. The sorrow and distress felt by all who witness the scene is really misplaced; they should envy the dead man his good fortune in escaping from this vale of tears to a better life, from this prison to freedom, from this exile to the true homeland.

This theme too has figured strongly in our Christian hymns:
Brief life is here our portion,
Brief sorrow, short-lived care:
The life that knows no ending,
The tearless life is there.
O happy retribution:
Short toil, eternal rest;
For mortals and for sinners
A mansion with the blest!...
Ohome of fadeless splendour,
Of flowers that bear no thorn,
Where they shall dwell as children
Who here as exiles mourn!
(St Bernard of Cluny)

O how glorious and resplendent,
Fragile body, shalt thou be,
When endued with so much beauty,
Full of health and strong and free,
Full of vigour, full of pleasure
That shall last eternally.
(Thomas à Kempis)

To the weary and the worn
Tell of realms where sorrows cease;
To the outcast and forlorn
Speak of mercy and of peace.
(Bishop Walsham How)

Soon shall come the great awaking,
Soon the rending of the tomb;
Then the scattering of all shadows,
And the end of toil and gloom.
(Bernhardt Ingemann)

Shadows gone, break of day,
Real life just begun.
There's no break, there's no end,
Just a living on.
(William Arms Fisher)

We by enemies distrest,
They in Paradise at rest;
We the captives, they the freed.
No longer must the mourners weep,
Nor call departed Christians dead;
For death is hallowed into sleep,
And every grave becomes a bed.
(John Mason Neale)

We must not say
That those are dead who pass away;
From this our world of flesh set free.
Father, in thy gracious keeping
Leave we now thy servant sleeping.
(John Ellerton)

Rejoice for a brother deceased,
Our loss is his infinite gain;
A soul out of prison released,
And freed from its bodily chain.
(Charles Wesley)

The most well-known expression of this theme comes from the great John Donne himself:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for thou art not soe;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death...
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!
(Holy Sonnets, X)

In other words, we have no need to fear death, because we won't really die or come to an end.

The truth is, of course, that we will. To gloss over this fact is dishonest, and no less so for being thought the Christian thing to do. Human life does come to an end, and however painful the realization of this may be, we do psychological harm to ourselves by taking refuge behind talk of sleep or release or passing on.

There is a tragic finality about death which we must take seriously, or it is not death we are talking about. The Christian may wish to add further comments of his own, but unless what he has to say is based on the reality of death, he is building on a lie.

DEATH FUTURE AND DEATH PAST

In the light of such a negative analysis of death, what further useful comment could the Christian possibly have to make?

One of the many comments made by St Paul is worth examining, because it admits quite openly the ambiguity with which he faces the prospect of death. On the one hand, he shares with all men the fear of death, and this disturbs him sufficiently to make him mix his metaphors thoroughly. In the imagery to which he turns, he speaks of the "heavenly body" which God has prepared for him, the counterpart of the earthly body to which he has become so attached. In his confusion, he is not sure whether to compare this body to a tent which one might put up, or a house which one might build, or the clothes which one might wear. What he is sure of is that he does not relish having his earthly body folded up (or demolished as it might be, or stripped off). He would much prefer, if possible, to have his heavenly body superimposed on top of the earthly tent/ building/clothes while he is still alive, and so escape the dreaded prospect of dying. He says:
We know that when the tent we live in on earth is folded up, there is a house built by God for us, an everlasting home not made by human hands, in the heavens. In this present state, we groan as we yearn to put on our heavenly home over the other. We should like to be found wearing clothes, and not without them. Yes we groan and find it a burden being still in this tent, not that we want to strip it off, but to put the second garment over it and to have what would otherwise have to die taken up into life.
(2 Corinthians 5:1-4)

Even for Paul, the mixture of metaphors is remarkable.

Yet in the very next sentence, he changes his tune entirely. Because in a way our life on earth is an exile from God. It is marked by a sense of God's immeasur¬able distance, and of our powerlessness to bridge the chasm that separates us from him. If death brings us finally and unequivocally into the presence of God, then there is a sense in which, however unknown that naked confrontation may be, one can only welcome it. The separation which leaves our lives so unfulfilled will be over. So Paul continues:
We are always full of confidence when we remember that to live in the body means to be exiled from the Lord, to go by faith and not by sight. We are full of confidence, I say, and actually want to be exiled from the body and make our home with the Lord.
(Ibid. 5:6-8)

Paul's more optimistic second-thoughts are based on a specifically Christian understanding of the death of Jesus. For his death too seemed to spell his furthest separation from that in which he had grounded his whole life. It was only after profound reflection that his disciples saw it with new eyes, as the moment of his closest union with God. God had not abandoned him, as even he had feared, but had endorsed him as the undistorting mirror of his own love and forgiveness.

The perfect image of God, Jesus was also seen by his followers as the perfect image of man. This was man as he was always meant to be. He was more than an individual: he was representative man, the beginning of a new mankind.

In this interpretation, the death of Jesus was more than the passing away of one good man. It affected all men, because it was something done on behalf of all mankind. Not as if he died in the place of others, to release them from the necessity of dying. On the con¬trary, his death somehow included the death of all other men. If he died, then they have in a sense died too, and entered into a new order of things. From then on, where they should feel most at home is no longer in the past order, for the death-knell has sounded over that. Where they really belong now is in the new world that has been opened up, here and now, by Jesus' death. Paul sums up this complex thought a few sentences further on:
We have reached the conclusion that one man died for all, and therefore all mankind has died. His purpose in dying for all was that men, while still in life, should cease to live for themselves ... With us therefore worldly standards have ceased to count ... When anyone is united to Christ, there is a new world; the old order has gone, and a new order has already begun.
(Ibid. 5:14-17) (N.E.B.)

The Christian explicitly commits himself to this new world-view at baptism. For the symbolism of that rite is that he has stepped into Jesus' grave to indicate that he counts that death as his own. Paul clarifies this thought elsewhere:
When we were baptized in Christ Jesus, we were baptized in his death; in other words ... we went into the tomb with him and joined him in death ... In union with Christ we have imitated his death... Our former selves have been crucified with him ... Having died with Christ, you must consider your¬selves to be dead.
(Romans 6:3-11)

If that is the background to Paul's thought in the passage in question, it is no wonder that he regards his death as being, somehow, already in the past. The death he is going to undergo in five (or ten or twenty) years' time he has in fact already died. The grave is not something that lies threateningly in front of him — in a sense it is already behind him. His death is not in the future — it is in the past and in the present, as he tries daily to make that significant baptism of his an ever-present reality:
Always, wherever we may be, we carry with us in our body the death of Jesus.
(2 Corinthians 4:10)

The prospect of future death will no doubt continue to frighten him. But since that death can be no more than the corroboration of something he has already come to terms with, of something he has had to experience many times throughout life, it no longer poses the threat it once did:
Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?
(1 Corinthians 15:55)

In fact, far from being a loss, the experience of future death can be nothing but gain:
Life to me, of course, is Christ, but then death will bring me something more.
(Philippians 1:21)

So Paul, having openly admitted his utterly human fear of death, has said that as a Christian he must add a further comment. In the light of his understanding of Jesus' death, he knows that he has already coped with that fear. Death has become for him a gateway to resurrection.

It might seem as if this contradicts what I said earlier in this article. With his talk of resurrection, is not Paul doing exactly the same as the hymn-writers I there took to task, glossing over the stark reality of death, and pretending it isn't really death at all?

He is not. For him death remains death, final and conclusive. If it did not, he could not talk of resurrection. For resurrection, whatever it means, is not a resumption of life after a brief interruption. It is a new creation, ex nihilo, out of the nothingness of death. For Paul, death remains an impenetrable darkness. But the darkness is filled with the creative presence of God.

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This article is an adaptation from the author's paperback, Death and After: What will Really Happen? Fount, 1980, and used with the Publisher's permission.

* After obtaining degrees in Theology and Scripture in Rome, Hubert Richards taught Scripture from 1949 to 1965. He was then Principal of an Institute of Religious Education from 1965 until 1972. Since 1975 he has been lecturer in Religious Studies in the School of Education, University of East Anglia and is also an author and song-writer.