What is it like to be dead?
Is Death an Enemy or a Friend? (Part 4)
This is my fourth and final excerpt from my final seminary paper on the question, “Is Death an Enemy or a Friend?”
My imagination enjoys thinking about new creation — the time after God judges the world and makes all things new (Isaiah 65:17, Revelation 21:5). I can imagine being reunited with those I love and living as our best selves in a world with only good and no evil.
But my imagination struggles when I think about what is happening in the in-between space, after death, but before we are resurrected into new life. When people are baptized, we talk about the symbolism of going into the water: dying to our old selves and coming up, alive with Jesus. I understand (at least in part) the going down and the coming up, but what about the time when we are under, fully submerged in the water? To be more forward, I wonder what is happening to my daughter as her body is buried and decomposing? Is Jesus anywhere to be found there? Thinking about this question terrifies me.
J. Todd Billings, in his book, Rejoicing in Lament, writes, “Death seems like the doorway to a world of the unknown.”1 Anything unknown is scary to me, but this unknown feels particularly haunting. It is the ultimate sign of my human finitude. I cannot and will never know all things, as God does.
Davison and Evans, in their book Care for the Dying, encourage me: “just as the words from the Creed ‘[he] died’ are an astonishing witness to God’s solidarity with humanity, so too are the words ‘[he] was buried’. As Jesus had said, ‘for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth’ (Matt. 12.40).”2
Jesus is the only one who has been to the grave and can now tell us what it is like. He not only understands the suffering of the dying process, and the fullness of life in resurrection, but he understands what it means to be in the grave.
Jesus is the Good Shepherd in every aspect of human life, including the process of dying and of being dead (John 10). The thought of what is happening to my daughter now, in the grave and beyond, is terrifying because I do not know it and cannot see it. But the grace of Jesus is that he has been there and he does know. And I can trust that he is forming my daughter into the most complete creature, making her fully human, making her new, just as he is doing so with me now.
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. — John 12:24
J. Todd. Billings. Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer & Life in Christ. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2015), 185.
Andrew Davison and Sioned Evans. Care for the Dying: A practical and pastoral guide. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 49.