Good Friday 2018

Remembering Death

March 30, 2018

Zion Lutheran Church + Nampa, ID

This Lenten season, we have had four deaths within the congregation, and there have been several other deaths of the family members or friends of our church family.  If you watch the news, tragedy and evil are reported upon regularly. The sad fact is that we are surrounded by death. We cannot ignore it, and it has always been this way. There was an ancient philosophical group called the Stoics who believed that it was important for people to remember death every day for the purpose of helping people to savor life, to live fully, to not be so quick to take your loved ones for granted. To the Stoic, death was a part of life; you’re born, you grow old, you die. It happens to everyone, and everything, that lives in this world. It is just the last chapter of life, the inevitable conclusion.

Many people today operate with this same sort of understanding. But it is not so for Christians. We remember the beginning, Genesis. We remember that death is not natural, it is not what God intended for His creation. When Christians remember death, we not only recall the end of this earthly life, but our first parents’ disobedience that let loose an enemy upon all creation. Death is not merely what happens when breathing or the heart stops. Adam and Eve did not stop breathing after they ate the forbidden fruit. So what is death, what is it die?

To put it plainly, death is separation from God. It is loosing the home that He prepared for His children. Death is not non-existence, but it is existence in exile apart from God’s love and God’s grace.  In this way, death is an enemy of God and God’s people, an enemy that brings a sorrow and despair of exile and homesickness. Jesus expresses it well upon the cross as He quotes Psalm 22, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

This Psalm expresses the sorrowful truth that death brings. We have lost our true home. The story of our journey, from conception onward, is a story of progressive loss, mounting up until at the end we lose even the body that served as a home for the soul in this mortal life.  What we normally think of death, the stopped heart, the lack of breath, is but a consequence of the exile into which we have all been born.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” These words spoken to Adam and Eve after the Fall are spoken to us each Ash Wednesday. Remember death. And as those words are spoken, ashes, the dead and charred remains of last years palms waved on Palm Sunday, an ancient sign of repentance are placed upon your head in the shape of an instrument of death and execution, the cross. To the world, could there be anything more morbid? But for Christians, it is a remembrance. Yes, a remembrance of death, but also of great love that came from the Father as He sent His Son, into our flesh to know this exile, this death, in His own body, nailed to the cross, suffering, bleeding, and dying, for the purpose to open for us once more the way to an eternal home.  Jesus said in John 14, a passage so often read at funerals when death is staring us right in the face, “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to Myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.” While this confused Thomas, who asked what this meant, Jesus’ response is one of His most famous, “I am the way, and the truth, and life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”  Jesus not only shows us the way home, but He is the way, securing an eternal home by fully entering into exile and loneliness, that by His death, His divine life would kill this enemy from the inside out.

So when we Christians think of death, we are to learn to think of it as a defeated enemy.  Death is bad, it is evil, it is an enemy to be sure. Death is not your friend, and it is not good when it rears its ugly head. But it is defeated by the Life of the Word, the Life that not even death can overcome.  And even with such a defeated enemy, God can use to His own good purposes. That is why we call today “Good Friday.”  So long ago, Jesus took the sin of the world upon Himself, dying the death that we all deserve, and robbing this enemy of all its power. We can believe, and speak, and live the words of St. Paul, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil 1:21).

In pondering our own death, we also ponder the day of judgment. We confess the Biblical truth that at Christ’s return, at the Resurrection, He will come to judge the living and the dead.  During Holy Week, Jesus Himself taught extensively and explicitly about impending judgment. We would do well to take this more seriously than we often do, for it is a serious thing. We all must give an account to the One who judges justly at the resurrection. This judgment though is not just the deeds done in this life, but it is how one stands before the King. If standing on our own, all our good works will amount to nothing. But with Christ, with the work of His Spirit creating and preserving faith to receive His grace, we are clothed with Jesus’ perfect righteousness.  

We know that is appointed that we die once and after that comes judgment, when the soul appears before God. If one lives with faith in Jesus, he will not be condemned because his sins had been forgiven on earth for the sake of Jesus. No matter when are where we die, by sudden or slow death, God will graciously receive the souls of His children and will on the Last Day will change our lowly bodies to be like His glorious body, by the power that enables Him to subdue all things to Himself. Jesus not only defeats death, but the accusations of the devil are all taken by Christ. “So when the devil throws your sins in your face and declares that you deserve death and hell, tell him this: ‘I admit that I deserve death and hell, what of it? For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where He is there I shall be also!’” — Martin Luther

The Christian then, knowing and believing in the resurrection of the dead at Christ’s return, looks upon death as defeated upon the cross, a time when the body rests in tomb, awaiting the resurrection, while the soul lives on with Christ in His presence, anticipating that same resurrection and the reuniting of body and soul to live in eternity with the Lord and all His saints. By the grace of God in Christ Jesus, we are taught to die a blessed death, and so to live a blessed life.  The work of salvation does not end with the death of Jesus, but continues into the victory of the resurrection.