Death: A Perennial Favorite
AM Psalm 38 • PM Psalm 119:25-48
Job 12:1,14:1-22 • Acts 12:18-25 • John 8:47-59
Today’s readings have a lot about death.
Job speaks about its utter finality. When “a man dies and is laid low/he breathes his last and is no more.” In Acts an adoring crowd hails Herod as a god, and when he doesn’t deny it, an angel whacks him and he’s eaten by worms. (Note the order of things. The worms don’t consume him after his death. He is eaten by worms and THEN he dies. Yipes.)
And then in John, Jesus seems to offer an alternative to Job’s take on the subject: “Whoever obeys my word will never see death.” When his listeners call this blasphemy and pick up stones to kill him, Jesus takes off.
Death is a pretty popular topic generally. There are at least three interesting things about it. First, death is guaranteed. Second, we are, as far as we know, the only one of the countless organisms on earth that knows that first thing. And finally, on the obvious followup—What happens next?—we’re as clueless as everything else. We can have faith and intuition and perhaps moments when we think we get a glimpse (I’ve had a couple), but we don’t know in an experiential or verifiable sense, as in “I know that my nose itches” or “I know that Theodore Roosevelt had a mustache.”
This has made death, and in particular that third point, irresistible to poets and novelists. There’s quite a literature on Hamlet’s “undiscovered country” and what Larry McMurtry called the Great Perhaps. Two of my favorites are George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo and A Brief History of the Dead by Little Rock’s Kevin Brockmeier.
For many contemporary Christians, the focus is on, to use the shorthand, “the afterlife.” That is, whether personal behavior or accepting Jesus’s divinity will admit us into an eternity of some blissfull existence. That focus is on an end game. I picture the hope as a base runner sliding “home,” with the umpire (St. Peter?) leaning over, flinging his arms out, and yelling “Safe!”
It’s appealing. I can smile large at the thought of hugging my daughter while my late parents once again berate me for my politics and desultory lawn care. But (point three above), I don’t know, and increasingly that focus strikes me as awfully close to a theology of selfishness, which in turn seems close to the opposite of everything Jesus was saying.
Instead I wonder if by “not knowing death” Jesus meant something like more truly knowing life, now, and by “obeying his word” he meant living out as fully as possible, now, his simple but demanding commandments. Maybe we should shift our eyes from the end game (“Safe!”) toward living more selflessly and sacrificially in the daily mess that has always been our world. It’s a bit paradoxical, but the older I get, the truer that feels and the less I think about “sliding home.”
Written by Elliott West
Elliott is professor of history emeritus at the University of Arkansas and has been a member at St. Paul’s for more than thirty years.