The Death of God and Our Death
Why the human body matters now and in eternity.
These days we rarely see death up close, in-person. A hundred years ago, at least one sibling would die in childhood, and our parents often died before they saw our children.
Now not only do our siblings and parents very often survive into our adulthoods, our parents usually live well past the life expectancy of a hundred years ago.
When we do die, we too often die alone in nursing homes or hospitals (I know, because I am too often called to attend these deaths when no one comes).
In older times, you died at home, surrounded by your family, who washed your body after you died, and dressed your body for burial, and then put you on ice while everyone came by the house to visit for a day or two; then they dug your grave themselves and lowered you into the ground.
Now the body is taken away immediately, handled by strangers, often cremated, and the body is not present at whatever church or funeral home service occurs, if one occurs, often months later, often as “memorials” or “celebrations” of the person’s life.
If it sounds like we too often sweep dying and death under the rug of our common life, are rarely proximate to it, this is the experience of this pastor.
Research, ancestral experience, and a gut check can help us see that the older traditions are far healthier ways of traversing death as families and communities, that there is psychological, physical, and spiritual health in washing bodies, building caskets, and digging graves, of witnessing a body of a loved one descend six feet under (even small children need to witness this).
Our bodies are deeply important and inseparable from us because God has a body exactly like ours, a body that died, a body that was prepared for burial, a body that was entombed, and a body that mourners attended to, wept over, and laid in the ground with their own hands and hearts. And that body is now risen, however transfigured for eternity, and is ascended into what it forever means to be God.
My friend, Paddy Lynch, a mortician, has taught me a lot about dead bodies. He says that they are, like newborn babies, the most vulnerable of humans, and what we do for the dead in their death is the highest form of corporal mercy, or mitzvah, we can perform. Why? Because the dead cannot do anything for us, are beyond returning the mercy.
At Lynch & Sons, they treat dead bodies with tremendous dignity, caring for them as intensely as infants, because they are as or more vulnerable (infants do not remain as vulnerable and can eventually, if they are grateful, return some of the mercies we bestow on them); also because dead bodies are, among the living, signs of the resurrection.
When we are dead God is finally able to do something with us, can finally redeem everything about us, because we can do nothing to resist his saving work. As one Scottish undertaker told my friend, Eric Peterson, a cemetery is ground that belongs to God — “God’s acre,” he called it — and “within it are buried the seeds of resurrection.” Our dead bodies sow into the ground the eventual renewal and permanence of the cosmos, and will in the end cause all things and all persons to be renovated and made eternal.
For, as Paddy’s uncle, Thomas insists, and as Cyril of Alexandria taught, the Spirit does not raise the idea of Jesus from death but his body. It is not the memory of Jesus that is enthroned in heaven but the eternal and human person we encounter in the gospels, whose resurrected body the Spirit knit in the womb of his mother.
Jesus lives on in the selfsame flesh Mary gave him at the right hand of the Father, wounds and memories and all.
If the body of Jesus remains the body of God in his death, and that body is somehow the body that leaves the tomb and appears to Mary Magdalene — even if after the resurrection the body of Christ has the ability to be in many places and persons, in many mysterious ways — we need to resist saying that the dead body of any human isn’t that person anymore.
Jesus is resurrection and life. And we are members of Christ. And are seated with Christ in heaven. There is one person who contains all others, who contains all worlds. We are because of this reality already the aroma of resurrection life everywhere we go even before we die.
Our lives should be fragrant with eternity.
We are the ones in the world who call brothers even those who hate us and forgive all by the resurrection.