The Difficulty of Death

There seems to be a tendency with Americans (and perhaps many other cultures in the world do it in different ways) where we do all we can to avoid the reality of death; rather than face it when it occurs, we do all that is in our power to disguise the situation as something less painful-something that is easier to deal with than what happens after death. It is as though these pacifying rituals are woven into our culture.

From the songs chosen to be sung, right down to the way we have our departed loved ones made-up for the day of their burial; the day we memorialize their lives we try our best to "push back the darkness" of the curse by pretending that it isn't there. We try not to even say that someone has died, instead we say that they have "passed away", "passed on", "gone home", and others. We tell one another that "oh, he went so peacefully and it was almost as though we could hear the rushing of angel wings as they came down to usher him into heaven".

And perhaps the most telling symptom of our desire to ignore the reality of death is that ritual where we spend godless amounts of money to make the empty shell of our loved one look as though their spirit still inhabits it. We comment to one another about how he looks 15 years younger, for heaven's sake people, it's a dead body...there is no spirit there. The pain and fear of death is rarely subsided by our futile cultic practices, in fact I think the reason we have accepted and prescribed the way we commonly deal with death is so that we don't have to really mourn those who God has removed from this earth; if we can talk more about how peacefully they went, and paint their bodies well enough that they don't really look dead (rather, they resemble some over-botoxed, 70 year old Hollywood has been) and sing songs about how happy they are to now be in the presence of Jesus, then we don't have to wonder if they were scared when they crossed the Jordan, or reflect on their lives with a measure of realism and really wonder if their bodies will actually be resurrected to new life instead of eternal punishment, and whatever happened to the funeral dirge, can we never be content to just mourn? We are told that it is OK to cry, but then we only sing songs of "victory", thus the whole emphasis that the Bible places on the difficulty of sin and the consequence of death is put to the side at the one time during our lives when it should have front page priority so we can face the frightening prospect of dying, an event about which even Christians should fear.

Certainly, we do have hope beyond the grave, hope that we will spend eternity with the Person who saved us from the wrath to come, but the final leg of our journey there has to be the most difficult. Because of Christs victory over it, death no longer has its sting, but that doesn't mean that death is no longer scary, it means that Christ purchased resurrection for all that the Father has given Him, and death has no eternal hold on their souls.