Thinking Death Christianly
Posted on 17 February 2010
Table of contents for On Death: Lenten Reflections
Lent is, among other things, a season for meditation on death: first, Christ’s death; second, my death, that is, the cessation of my mortal existence; and, third, my death with Christ, that is, my sanctification – at least one aspect of it.
Let me say, first, Christian spirituality is not morbid. It has no fascination with death and does not fetishize suffering. We call the day of Jesus’ death ‘good’ only because of what we know about the days after Jesus’ death. In and of itself, the cross is no good, and should not be thought in isolation from the life that preceded it and the new life that succeeds it.
However, Christian spirituality does not ignore the reality of dying, either. It refuses to think that Jesus is himself apart from his horrible sufferings and his more horrible dying and being dead; it also resists the temptation to think that Jesus’ resurrection means that death is no longer an evil.
If we hope to be faithful to the church and the scriptures – and so faithful to God – then we must not veer into morbidity on the one side or sentimentality on the other, for one is too worldly and the other too unworldly. Neither takes seriously the marriage of heaven and earth that is the realization of the Kingdom of God. While one thinks of death as the ultimate if not the only reality, the other refuses to think of death at all. A hopeless form of existentialism arises from the first way of thinking; a naive pietism arises from the latter. We must reject both ways of thinking because they claim Jesus’ story – or at least pieces of that story – as legitimation for a way of living in the world that arises from a shared hatred for the world, although they express this hatred in different ways.
We must learn to think death Christianly, for if we cannot, then we can’t make sense of the Gospel or of ourselves and the world in light of the Gospel. Without thinking death, our imaginations are left starved and impoverished, and we find ourselves unable to live the life Christ calls us to.
Lent, then, is a gift: an offering of time for learning to rightly think and feel about death, in all the senses I mentioned above, and so to prepare ourselves for (abundant, that is, Kingdom) life.
5 responses to Thinking Death Christianly
You know if you just dropped the adjective “kingdom” a little more often less non-denoms would disagree with you.
(I let a friend read this post and he couldn’t understand a word [do to his own ignorance], however, as soon as he saw “(…kingdom) life” he was sold.
That is the best tip I’ve received in months! You should be my ‘handler’.
I love the last paragraph especially, thanks for sharing.
Thinking death Christianly seems probable if death is singular, when it’s among a family member or friend or stranger or even myself.
This is so much harder to process when I think of death on a mass scale…like the deaths in Haiti.
Sorry, my comments were limited to concrete examples.
I agree with Eli, Iove the last paragraph and thank you for sharing.