Will death find us living?
Sometimes it’s difficult to come to terms with hard realities. You know, those pesky inevitables of life. Like needing to brush your teeth. Those cookie dough bites aren’t going to unstick themselves. Or the fact that no matter how virtuous your dental hygiene habits are one day you will die.
Everyone living honestly must prepare for their taxes as well as their funeral. We must recognize the fragility of life, the fleeting illusion of safety. This usually happens in a person's life when we have a so-called ‘brush with death.’ However, this doesn’t just include that few weeks of teaching your teenager how to drive. Every person eventually realizes that they have an expiration date only the Maker knows (Heb 9:27).
Something interesting happens when we become aware of death. We feel fragile, naked, exposed. This ends up becoming the defining feature of our lives. Confronted with our own mortality life begins to take on a distinct shape. Some respond in fear of death’s looming shadow by bending inward, cultivating a life of safety and isolation. Others respond by grabbing a lantern and a walking stick, moving toward death's dark shadow with the resolve to live.
Modern life and all it’s toys have already encouraged our lives to take a certain shape. A great inward bending has already been years in the making. The conduit has been kinked and there's no bending it back. But something else has happened. The pandemic has served as a giant metal break in our lives, encouraging our lives to further bend and turn inward. The pandemic has done what wars, famines, and plain old hard living has done in generations past. It has made us all painfully aware of our mortality.
This leaves us with life’s most important question. Will death find you living? Or will death find you cowering in fear, sipping a 5 dollar latte, ordered by remote control? (Just to be clear, it’s not the latte that’s the problem. It’s the fear.)
The great wisdom traditions of the past have answered this with the thunderous cry—live! The preacher in the book of Ecclesiastes put it this way. “There is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; [13] also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man” (Ecclesiastes 3:12–13). Confronted with death the call is to create, enjoy, and pursue life.
The only way that can truly be possible is if death loses its sting. Which is what the hope of the resurrection of Christ brings.“Death is swallowed up in victory… O death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:54–55). Hope brings life to a present full of death. Because death is not the end. As the old blues folk song puts it, “there ain't no grave, can hold my body down.” So for those who have hope, when death does come, it will find us living.