Death and Easter Resurrection

You can’t really feel the force of Easter and resurrection without first feeling the force of death. This year those two were particularly juxtaposed for me, as I attended my Aunt’s funeral on Holy Saturday and along with that sorrow reflected again on the still-recent death of my own father.

When I stare death in the face I’m struck by two things. The first is the ugliness and, really, wrongness of it. Stretched, gaunt, wasting, expiring - all the good and vitality and health in a person stolen away. And it’s not as if life itself is a picnic either. Aunt Leslie had a hard life - unmarried, struggling to make ends meet, lonely, dreams unfulfilled. But with hope and a church community and family that she cared for. Death is a final end to all of her suffering, but also a final end (here, with us) to those goods.

And that finality is the second thing. Death is a horrible, crushing weight that we can’t escape, for ourselves or those we love. I don’t know how you can look it in the face, really look, and not despair at the end, the finality that cuts us all off from the world. How can we stand up under such a terrible burden? How can we know, really know that we and our children and all the goods that we love in the world are passing away and will be gone, gone, gone - and probably sooner rather than later?

This is what resurrection means: it means that death is not the most powerful force in the world. It means that life is stronger than death. If this is not true, if death really is ultimate, then we are all doomed - there is no hope, no point. The Biblical taunt - “O death, where is your victory? O grave, where is your sting?” - is the taunt of a fly in the face of a nuclear weapon. It sounds crazy. But sanity really is what is at stake. If we can be allied with a force greater than death, if we really can know that life, that Christ, that God will bring us through death to a new life forever beyond its reach, then and only then can we really stand up.