Death

If the God who revealed life to us, and whose only desire is to bring us to life, loved us so much that he wanted to experience with us the total absurdity of death, then—yes, then there must be hope; then there must be something more than death; then there must be a promise that is not fulfilled in our short existence in this world; then leaving behind the ones you love, the flowers and the trees, the mountains and the oceans, the beauty of art and music, and all the exuberant gifts of life cannot be just the destruction and cruel end of all things; then indeed we have to wait for the third day.

There is a place called ‘heaven’ where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet.

It is an inspired monologue. God in His provision has arranged for this one book of mere rational philosophy to be included in the canon of Scripture because this too is divine revelation. It is divine revelation precisely in being the absence of divine revelation. It is like the silhouette of the rest of the Bible. In this book God reveals to us exactly what life is when God does not reveal to us what life is. Ecclesiastes frames the Bible as death frames life.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.'

If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste for death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin's answer.

ALL MANKIND is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators: some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation; and his hand shall hind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another: As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this hell calls us all…. No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Then Aslan turned to them and said: “You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.” Lucy said, “We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.” “No fear of that,” said Aslan. “Have you not guessed?” Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them. “There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.” And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.  For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country.

The Lord has taken away your sin; you are not going to die.

Postmodernism opens with the sense of irrevocable loss and incurable fault—a death that 'begins' with the death of God and 'ends' with the death of ourselves. We are in a time between times and a 'place which is no place.'

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night.

We read in Genesis 5:5 that 'Adam ... died.' Why did he die? What was the origin of death? Was it there from the beginning? Certainly vegetable death was. God created 'seed-bearing plants ... that bear fruit with seed in it' (Gn. 1:lff.). That is, the cycle of blossom, fruit, seed, death and new life was established in the created order. Animal death existed too, for many fossils of predators have been found with their prey in their stomach. But what about human beings? Paul wrote that death entered the world through sin (Rom. 5:12). Does that mean that, if he had not sinned, he would not have died? Many ridicule this notion. 'Obviously', writes C. H. Dodd with great self- confidence, 'we cannot accept such a speculation as an account of the origin of death, which is a natural process inseparable from organic existence in the world we know ...'(1) We have already agreed that death is 'a natural process' in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. But we must not think of human beings as merely rather superior animals, who on that account die like animals. On the contrary, it is because we are not animals that Scripture regards human death as unnatural, an alien intrusion, the penalty for sin, and not God's original intention for his human creation. Only if Adam disobeyed, God warned him, would he 'surely die' (Gn. 2:17). Since, however, he did not immediately die, some conclude that it was spiritual death, or separation from God, which was meant. But when God later pronounced his judgment on Adam, he said to him, 'Dust you are, and to dust you will return' (Gn. 3:19). So physical death was included in the curse, and Adam became mortal when he disobeyed. Certainly the Rabbis understood Genesis in this way. For example, 'God created man for incorruption, and made him an image of his own proper being; but by the envy of the devil death entered into the world...'(Wisdom 2:23f.). This is why the biblical authors lament death, and are outraged by it. They see it as demoting us, levelling us down to the animal creation, so that we (God's special creation) have become 'like the beasts that perish' (Ps. 49:12). The author of Ecclesiastes feels the indignity of it too: 'Man's fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal' (Ec. 3:19). It appears, therefore, that for his unique image-bearers God originally had something better in mind, something less degrading and squalid than death, decay and decomposition, something which acknowledged that human beings are not animals. Perhaps he would have 'translated' them like Enoch and Elijah, without the necessity of death. Perhaps he would have 'changed' them 'in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye', like those believers who will be alive when Jesus comes (1 Cor. 15:51f.). Perhaps too we should think of the transfiguration of Jesus in this light. His face shone, his clothing became dazzling white, and his body translucent like the resurrection body he would later have. Because he had no sin, he did not need to die. He could have stepped straight into heaven without dying. But he deliberately came back in order of his own free and loving will to die for us. (1) C. H. Dodd, "The Epistle of Paul to the Romans", The Moffatt New Testament Commentary (Hodder and Stoughton, llth edn. 1947), p. 81.

Towards noon Pilate gave judgment, and they made such haste to execution as that by noon he was upon the cross. There now hangs that sacred body upon the cross, rebaptized in his own tears, and sweat, and embalmed in his own blood alive. There are those bowels of compassion which are so conspicuous, so manifested, as that you may see them through his wounds. There those glorious eyes grew faint in their sight, so as the sun, ashamed to survive them, departed with his light too. And then that Son of God, who was never from us, and yet had now come a new way unto us in assuming our nature, delivers that soul (which was never out of his Father's hands) by a new way, a voluntary emission of it into his Father's hands; for though to this God our Lord belonged these issues of death, so that considered in his own contract, he must necessarily die, yet at no breach or battery which they had made upon his sacred body issued his soul; but emisit, he gave up the ghost; and as God breathed a soul into the first Adam, so this second Adam breathed his soul into God, into the hands of God. There we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross, there bathe in his tears, there suck at his wounds, and lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an ascension into that kingdom which He hath prepared for you with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood. Death’s Duel, John Donne http://www.thewords.com/articles/duel2.htm

I shall rise from the dead.... I shall see the Son of God, the Sun of Glory, and shine myself as that sun shines. I shall be united to the Ancient of Days, to God Himself, who had no morning, never began.... No man ever saw God and lived. And yet, I shall not live till I see God; and when I have seen him, I shall never die.

The Lord has taken away your sin; you are not going to die.

As time passed, my father struggled for more to hold on to, asking me again and again: had I told him everything. And finally I said to him, 'maybe all I know about Paul is that he was a fine fisherman.'

'You know more than that,' my father said; 'he was beautiful.' And that was the last time we spoke of my brother's death.

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.

Then a great beauty was revealed in him, so that all who after came there looked on him in wonder; for they saw that the grace of his youth, and the valour of his manhood, and the wisdom and majesty of his age were blended together. And long there he lay, an image of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.

That a god should put up with adversity, I could understand. The gods of Hinduism face their fair share of thieves, bullies, kidnapers and usurpers. What is Ramayana but the account of one long, bad day for Rama? Adversity, yes. Reversals of fortune, yes. Treachery, yes. But humiliation? Death? I couldn't imagine Lord Krishna consenting to be stripped, naked, whipped, mocked, dragged through the streets and, to top it off, crucified--at at the hands of mere humans to boot. I'd never heard of a Hindu god dying. But divinity should not be blighted by death. It's wrong...It was wrong of this Christian God to let his avatar die. That is tantamount to letting a part of himself die. For if the Son is to die, it cannot be fake. If God on the cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me that it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect?

Why not leave death to mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin’s answer….

Then Mum died. And Dad grew even quieter. As if she took away with her the few words he’d possessed.

It’s a strange thing, becoming an orphan at sixteen. To lose your family long before you’ve had time to create your own to replace it. It’s a very specific sort of loneliness.

He hoped this would make his father more forgiving about Ove losing his job, once they were reunited. He had to sit on the wooden

Ove carried her upstairs to the bedroom. She nagged him for years about moving into the empty downstairs guest room, but Ove refused. After a decade or so she realized that this was his way of showing her that he had no intention of giving up. That God and the universe and all the other things would not be allowed to win. Chapter 35. A Man Called Ove and Social Incompetence

Something inside a man goes to pieces when he has to bury the only person who ever understood him. There is no time to heal that sort of wound. Acknowledgments

Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell.

‘Death was ever present, because the Númenóreans still, as they had in their old kingdom, and so lost it, hungered after endless life unchanging. Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry; in secret chambers withered men compounded strong elixirs, or in high cold towers asked questions of the stars. And the last king of the line of Anárion had no heir.

And it is not always good to be healed in body. Nor is it always evil to die in battle, even in bitter pain.

Out of doubt, out of dark, to the day’s rising he rode singing in the sun, sword unsheathing. Hope he rekindled, and in hope ended; over death, over dread, over doom lifted out of loss, out of life, unto long glory.

Disintegration is the main event in corruption —the breakdown of personal and social integrity, the loss of shape, strength, and purpose that make some entity an “entirety” and make it this entirety. 63 As Sylvia Fraser’s story reminds us, sin tends to disintegrate both its victims and its perpetrators. Disintegration is always deterioration, the prelude and postlude to death.

On the one hand, sin tends to despoil things. Unarrested, sin despoils even its own agents, eventually causing “the very death of the soul.” 71 On the other hand, sin is remarkably generative: sin yields more and more sin.

They knew that sin is both fatal and fertile.

Indeed, like cancer, sin kills because it reproduces.

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.