BLESSED DEATH: THE CHRISTIAN’S ATTITUDE

“Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord” . . .

Blessed death! This is hardly the feeling that prevails concerning death generally. Should this be the attitude of the Christian? After all, the Bible not only speaks of the sting and victory that death has over us, but it also associates death with evil (Deut. 30:15) and refers to “the bitterness of death” (1 Sam. 15:32) . Psalms 55:4 reads: “My heart is in anguish within me, the terrors of death have fallen upon me.”

A friend who recently experienced his first loss of a close loved one remarked: “I did not know death could be so ugly and cruel.” The man who said this is a good Christian with a lively hope of immortality. Did he have the wrong attitude toward the death of his father who died a Christian?

Death is an experience that is to be prepared for as much as any other great moment in life. Cicero, one of the Stoics who dedicated themselves to the understanding of such mysteries as death, defined philosophy as the discipline which teaches man how to die. Another philosopher, Montaigne, contended that it takes greater moral stamina to die than it does to live. Socrates thought of his life as a preparation for death. When his executioner asked him if he were ready to take the poison, Socrates replied: “Do you not know that I have been prepared for death all my life.”

Part of the reason why death seems ugly and cruel may be because we have made such little preparation for it. Funeral customs may add to the pain of losing a loved one. Funerals are not only unnecessarily expensive, but unnecessarily cruel. When Abraham lost a loved one, he woefully cried out: “Bury my dead out of my sight.” This we do, but we probably make too much of it.

When our father passed away, one of my brothers who lived in a distant state remarked that it would be so much more sensible if the mortician were instructed simply to take the body, prepare it for burial, and inter it at the designated place, thus sparing the family the pain of burying a loved one. As it was, my brother, shocked by the sudden news of his father’s passing, had to make a long, strenuous trip, suffering all the expense of both travel and missing work for several days. And for what? He got to see his living loved ones, but it was hardly a time for an enjoyable visit. There was the ordeal of funeral arrangements, sitting with the body hour upon hour. Add to that the funeral service with all the words and songs (“Is any among you suffering? Let him pray. Is any cheerful? Let him sing praise.” Jas. 5:13).

Well-meaning friends gathered, all of them saying about the same thing over and over, which may hurt more than it helps. We stood around and waited and watched as they carted the casket here and there. Then we paraded through the city in a long line of cars out to the cemetery where we went through more of the same thing.

My brother had a point: it was cruel. It might have made much more sense if the body could have immediately been disposed of by professional people with perhaps representatives of the family present. Then the family at a more favorable time could have had a gathering some weeks later in memory of their father.

In the case of our mother’s passing it was even more cruel, not only because it was mother, but also because we had to return at such a time to the grave of our father and witness the two graves together. Then to our horror we learned that the grave had been dug at the wrong place. So we conveyed our dead mother’s body back to town (and we were all away from home in the small town that our parents called home) to a different funeral home where the body was kept for the night. The next day the body was properly interred at the right place with only two representatives of the family standing by. Even after two years it makes me shudder to think about it all.

In some of the cold countries of Europe, where the ground freezes too hard to dig into, it is customary for the mortician to take the body and store it until the ground thaws. The family is not even around when the burial takes place, and nobody thinks anything about it. In our own country I have known of some distraught widows, so terribly burdened with the tragic death of their companions, subjected to two or three funerals in as many different places before the body is finally laid to rest in some distant place. The fact is that there is a lot of nonsense about our funeral practices.

It might be much more Christian if the body could be buried quickly and quietly after a simple service right there in the room where the loved one dies. The elders of the congregation and a very few other select friends, along with what members of the family would be close by, could gather for prayers to God and thanksgiving for his saintly life. It is no time to be singing! Then let the body be taken then and buried. It might be fitting for a close friend or two, or the elders of the church, attend the body to its resting place. Spare the family! Then later — weeks later — there could be a public service in memory of the deceased if the life of the person would warrant it. The family could then gather under more edifying conditions.

To the Christian death can be and should be a blessed experience, especially his own death; and once death is viewed as beni mori by the one who does the dying, it will become more bearable even to his loved ones. “And I heard a voice from heaven saying, ‘Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord henceforth.’ ‘Blessed indeed,’ says the Spirit, ‘that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them!” (Rev. 14:13) The blessing, “Let me die the death of the righteous” (Num. 23:10), is surely to be desired, but this can come only by recognizing that death is part of God’s plan for us.

“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” (Psa. 116:15) is a scripture that should help us to see death as a beautiful experience. But the most edifying truth of all to the Christian is that God through the Messiah destroyed death. The Christian really never dies at all! “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25-26). Jesus asked his disciples if they really believed this, and so we might ask ourselves; for if we truly believe that through Christ death has no more power over us, we are indeed “more than conquerors” through him.

Heb. 2:14-15 shows how the Christ took upon himself the likeness of man in order “that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil” By this means he delivers from death all those who “through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage.” This shows that the Christ is the answer to our ugly and painful experience with death as he is to all our other problems.

We need to give some attention to the problem of the so-called “death agony” or the ordeal of dying. None of us likes to think about that moment when we draw our last breath of life. We suppose that the act of dying is a cruel experience. This impression comes from such things as “the death rattle,” muscular contortions, and facial grimaces that are often present in the dying. We watch all this and suppose that the dying one is in pain. The best medical opinion is that this is not true. The rattle and the contortions are only physical, the reactions of a dying organism. Dr. J. R. Cavanaugh in The Catholic Nurse says, “Mentally, when death is near, his state of mind is peaceful. Dying is easy for the dying.” He says “the death agony” is only imaginary. Pain and death rarely go together.

Sir William Osler, the famous: British physician, says that pain rarely attends death. He tells of the case of a man who passed deep into the valley of death only to return, and he spoke of “the dream-like delicious sensation of the profound collapse in which he almost died.”

Dr. Cavanaugh urges his Roman Catholic nurses to view death with dignity. He insists that the patient whose case is hopeless should not be subjected to endless oxygen tents, needlessly, for he dies more like some complicated experimental animal than as a human being. He accuses the large metropolitan hospital of making of dying “an ordeal which has somewhat deprived death of its dignity.”

Cavanaugh raises the question of whether life-prolonging measures are moral, pointing to the fact that Hippocrates, the father of medicine, forbade the administration of remedies to those beyond hope. He rejects euthanasia (mercy killings) but advocates what he calls agathansia, which means “a good death.” This is to permit the patient to die naturally and with decorum.

The Christian is concerned with the problem of how to die gracefully and peacefully as well as with how to live a life worthy of that manner of death. One of the finest illustrations of noble dying is Socrates, who lived four centuries before Christ, a man described by one of his contemporaries as “the wisest, justest and best.” And after 2,000 years of Christianity we have to concede that he knew more about dying than most Christians do.

On the day of his execution he talked calmly with his disciples about the meaning of life and death (“When I have drunk the poison I shall leave you and go to the joys of the blessed”) and soul and body (“Let a man be of good cheer about his soul, who having cast away the pleasures and ornaments of the body as alien to him and working harm rather than good, has sought after the pleasures of knowledge; and has arrayed his soul, not in some foreign attire, but in her own proper jewels, temperance, justice, courage, and nobility”) , and of the world to come (“They go from hence into the other world and returning hither, are born again from the dead”).

“How shall we bury you?” his disciples asked of Socrates. The humor of his reply reflects his wholesome attitude about death: “In any way you like, but you will have to catch me first!” He was trying to teach his grief-stricken disciples that death is but a journey, not a cessation of life. He added: “Do not say, ‘We have buried Socrates’, for these will be false words . . . say that you are burying my body only, and do with that whatever is usual.”

If Socrates could have that kind of faith in a pagan world long before Christianity (and it makes a good question to ask how he got the faith!), should we not have even a richer view of death?

Someone has said, “A man who is born once will die twice; a man who is born twice will die once.”

“We are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8)

“As it is my eager expectation and hope that I shall not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” (Phillip. 1:20-21) — The Editor