Death Sucks
Jesus hated death and so should you.
Psalm 130 has been my favorite psalm since I was about twelve years old. It’s the only psalm that has a repeated line: More than watchmen wait for the morning. More than watchmen wait for the morning. Something about that singular repetition, in all of the poetry of the Psalms, stuck out to me as being so poetic that it must be important.
Little did I know that as I got older that psalm would become my favorite for reasons I couldn’t have anticipated.
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. O Lord, give ear to the voice of my supplication.
Out of the depths. What kind of depths? The depths of despair? The depths of sin? Perhaps even the depths of the grave itself? The Latin liturgical title for Psalm 130 is De Profundis, which is taken from the first words of the Psalm: “Out of the depths.”
Profundis is the Latin word that roots our English word “profound.” We’ve mostly siloed “profound” off to the realm of philosophy and metaphysics — where it can’t bother anybody. But profound itself is a deeper word than we’ve allowed it to be. More than deep thoughts, profound relates to the depth of feeling, the deep wounds of suffering, the immeasurable impact of loss. These are the depths from which Psalm 130 is written.
The Hebrew word used here for “depths” is ma’amakim (מַעֲמַקִּים), and it means more than sadness. Ma’amakim is the word for the primordial deep in Genesis 1, the formless chaos before God spoke light into existence. It’s where Jonah went when he ran from God and the sea swallowed him whole. It’s deeper than the grave. This is the place of un-creation, the void where nothing is.
The psalmist isn’t praying from a bad day. The psalmist is praying from the abyss.
I have written about this psalm before, and I keep coming back to it. I think that’s because “the depths” seems to be the default setting for much of life. And we’re not alone in the depths, even when it feels like we’ve been utterly abandoned.
Take the story of Lazarus, for example.
If you had been here
Martha says it first. She goes out to meet Jesus on the road before he even reaches the house. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Then Mary says it. She falls at his feet and says the same words. Identical. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
I know this prayer. I’ve prayed it. Most people who’ve lost someone they love have prayed it, whether they used those exact words or not. Where were you? I believed you could have stopped this. You didn’t. And I still, somehow, can’t stop believing in you.
Real death, real mourners
One of the things that sticks out to me about the Lazarus story is how much John insists on the reality of what happened. This isn’t a private miracle. This isn’t behind closed doors. John is specific: “many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary, to console them concerning their brother.” A whole community has turned out. Lazarus was beloved. This is public grief.
And then there’s the detail that matters more than it first appears. They’re about to unseal the tomb as Jesus instructs, and Martha says, “Hold up. It’s been four days. Decay will have set in.” There was no embalming. Anointing the body for burial was the best they could do to buy a few days for people to grieve and say goodbye. But after three or four days, it was game over.
Which means, to use the nomenclature of The Princess Bride, Lazarus was no longer mostly dead. He was all the way dead. We can’t chalk this up to maybe he was in a coma. Everyone knew. Enough time had passed since Lazarus breathed his last that there was no hope.
No hope, that is, unless you’re dealing with someone who refuses to let death have the last word.
The memes
The internet has taken the Lazarus story and turned it into a bit. You’ve probably seen it. The premise: Lazarus is up in heaven, having the time of his life. Bad knee healed. Mansion decorated. Everything is perfect. And then Jesus ruins it by dragging him back to earth.
The comedian John Crist does a whole routine from Lazarus’s point of view. Lazarus is walking around heaven, feeling great, finally free from his ailments, and someone taps him on the shoulder: “Excuse me, is Lazarus here? Yeah, listen, we don’t normally do this, but we’ve got to send you back. Back to the Middle East with no air conditioning. Sorry!”
It’s funny. But the joke depends on a theology that has caused real harm to real people.
The premise of the joke is that coming back to life is the bad outcome. That being alive in this world, in a body, is worse than being dead. That the best thing that can happen to a person is to die and leave this place behind.
Said gently in Bible studies, this sounds like comfort: “He’s in a better place.” Said brutally in internet culture, it becomes the punchline: Jesus is the villain for making Lazarus come back.
If the best thing that can happen is death, then grief is irrational. If your loved one is in a better place, if they’ve graduated to glory, if they’re finally home, then what exactly are you crying about? You should be celebrating. Right?
Nobody does. Nobody actually does that. And the reason nobody does it is because somewhere underneath all the pious language, everybody knows: death is wrong. Death is not how it’s supposed to be. Something in us recognizes that death is an intruder, not a friend.
The theology behind the meme creates a double bind for grieving people. You’re mourning something you’ve been told you should celebrate. Your tears feel like a failure of faith. You’ve been handed a framework that makes your grief irrational, and when the grief comes anyway (because it always comes), you’re left not only heartbroken but ashamed of being heartbroken.
We put tissues in the pews and then tell people not to cry at funerals.
What Jesus actually does at the tomb
But you know who cried at a funeral? Jesus.
Not once, but twice, John tells us that Jesus, standing among the gathered mourners, two heartbroken sisters and a community of people reeling from the death of a beloved man, was deeply disturbed and troubled in spirit. The briefest verse in scripture is also the most evocative.
Jesus wept.
He knew what he was about to do. He was about to call Lazarus out of that tomb. And still he weeps. Why?
Because death sucks.
Death is not a friend to be welcomed, a release to be embraced, nor is it a monster to be frightened of. It is an enemy. The very enemy Jesus came to defeat.
And so Jesus, standing at the opening to Lazarus’s tomb, begins his full assault on death, hell, and the grave.
To imply that Jesus is sad to bring Lazarus back from some heavenly vacation makes a dangerous mistake. It says: heaven good, earth bad. Spirit good, body bad. Escape good, creation bad. And if that’s the framework, then the entire mission of Jesus collapses. Jesus didn’t come to evacuate people from creation and leave everything the way he found it. His mission is to reorder the cosmos under the banner of the kingdom of God. Or, as Handel puts it so dramatically in the pinnacle of his most famous oratorio, the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ. And he shall reign for ever and ever.
John has been building to this moment from the very first verse of his Gospel. In the beginning was the Word. That’s creation language. The Word through whom all things were made is now exercising creation power over death itself. Water into wine. Forgiveness of sins. Bread for the multitudes. Sight to the blind. And now: life to the dead. Lazarus is not an interruption of the mission. Lazarus is the final movement of the salvation story before Jesus takes up the cross.
Jesus is the resurrection and the life. His most primal enemy is death.
Jesus weeps, because Jesus hates death. But the sequence matters. Weeping first, then resurrection. Jesus doesn’t skip over the grief to get to the good part. He doesn’t rush Mary and Martha to the punchline. He enters the depths with them before he brings Lazarus out.
Dry bones
God takes Ezekiel by the hand and sets him down in the middle of a valley. And the valley is full of bones. God walks him around, makes him look. There are bones everywhere, scattered across the ground, and they are completely dried out. Then God asks him a question: “Can these bones live?”
And Ezekiel doesn’t try to answer. He says, “Lord God, you alone know.”
The first thing that comes to mind when I read this is: this must be a battlefield. Not necessarily complete skeletons. Dismembered. Slain. This isn’t merely the site of some mass burial. This is a scene of utter devastation. Defeat was so absolute that there wasn’t anybody left to bury the dead, and the victors didn’t bother to.
Most of us have probably visited a battlefield at some point. And when you visit them, they’re kind of like parks, right? Green fields, historical markers, the occasional cannon. But imagine if we could see the carnage that covered those places. Imagine what Ezekiel saw.
The aftermath. Nothing left but dry bones.
And it’s in that valley that God shows his power. It would be impressive enough if the bones knit themselves back together and you got a skeleton army. But God doesn’t stop at skeletons. He puts muscles back on. He puts the tendons in. He makes these things fully functional. What was just a valley of bones has become a living, breathing army of those whom God has called into life out of death.
Paul picks up the same thread in Romans. One of the central ideas running through the entirety of that letter is life in the midst of death. Because of sin, we human beings have found ourselves enslaved and subject to death. What are we going to do about that?
Paul’s answer: we’re not going to do anything about that, because God has already taken care of it. The same God that raised Jesus Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also (Romans 8:11).
The harrowing
In John’s gospel, Lazarus is the last miracle before the story shifts to the plot to kill Jesus, his farewell discourse, betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion. Shortly after Jesus raises his friend from the dead, he will go to the cross. Allow humanity to live up to its worst instincts. All of the hatred, all of the rage, all of the brutality humanity can muster, unleashed on him. He’s going to let it happen. And then he’s going to enter the gaping maw of the grave.
But he’s not stopping there. He’s going all the way to hell.
And thanks be to God, he’s not going there to stay. He’s not even going there for a visit. He’s going there to destroy it.
I love that line in the Apostles’ Creed, right after “he was crucified, dead, and buried.” The creed declares, “he descended into hell.”
Jesus doesn’t just go to the cross, go to the grave, and come back to life. He goes to the cross. Goes to the grave. Descends into hell. Then he comes back.
What does he do while he’s in hell? He walks into hell and he knocks the devil’s teeth in and kicks the gate open from the inside.
There is an incredible Orthodox icon commonly known as the “Harrowing of Hell.” There are many, many artistic depictions of this scene. Jesus stands in the foreground. Behind him, the gates of hell stand wide open, broken, kicked out from the inside, as if Jesus has just come through action-hero style and knocked them off their hinges.
And then Jesus has his arms stretched out. On one side, he’s yanking Eve out of her grave. On the other side, he’s yanking Adam out of his.
Because there is nowhere we can go where Jesus won’t come get us. We can’t do it. We can’t get far enough away that God won’t rescue us, won’t come find us in the worst of our situations, won’t go diving into a pile of dry bones to pull life out of death.
That’s what Jesus does for Lazarus. But this story isn’t just about Lazarus. It isn’t one man getting real lucky. Jesus does that to show us what he will do for all of us, for the entire world, for the whole cosmos. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead because Jesus is raising you from the dead.
The city that comes down
And here’s where the meme theology finally falls apart completely.
Heaven is not the destination. Heaven is the layover.
We have been so steeped in the language of “die and go to heaven” that we can’t think of anything beyond the heaven part. But the Bible can. The last book of Scripture doesn’t end with souls floating in the sky. It ends with a city coming down.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the dwelling of God is with mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:1-4)
Heaven comes to earth. Not the other way around. God moves in with us.
At the end of everything, our resurrected bodies (not disembodied spirits, but our resurrected bodies) will be restored in a restored creation. Death and sorrow and pain are no more. Not because we’ve escaped creation, but because creation itself has been made new.
This world, this life that we’re given, is good and important and matters. The bodies we inhabit matter. The people we love matter. The ground we walk on matters. God’s goal is not to yank us out of it but to restore it completely.
Death is an invasion of something God made and called good. And Jesus didn’t come to surrender creation to the invader. He came to take it back.
All shall be well
This year, Holy Week is a strange conflation of joy and grief for my family.
Yesterday, Palm Sunday, we celebrated my wife’s birthday.
Tomorrow, Tuesday in Holy Week, our beloved son Titus would have turned five years old. Would have.
Titus died at 19 months, leaving a wound in our family that will never heal. Near the anniversary of his death my wife gave birth to our second son, Augustine. On Tuesday, the same day we will go to Titus’s grave with cake and decorations, we have an ultrasound of our third son, who will be born later this year.
The liturgical calendar didn’t ask my permission to hold all of this in one week. But that is part of what makes Holy Week such an important part of the Church Year. It holds joy and grief together because they are inevitable when you love. Palm Sunday knows this. Every parent who has buried a child and then dared to have another one knows this. The parade and the passion are not two different stories. They are one story, told from two directions.
I stood in my churches yesterday and told both stories, the way I always do. The palms and the passion. Hosanna and Crucify Him in the same service. Because the church has always insisted on telling both stories in the same breath. You don’t get to wave palm branches and skip straight to Easter. You have to walk through the whole week: from acclamation to condemnation, the supper and the betrayal, the King of Kings wearing the crown of thorns.
First the tomb. And then, only then, the morning.
The same Spirit of God that raised Jesus Christ from the dead gives life to our mortal bodies.
No matter what happens. No matter what we endure. No matter what we suffer. No matter how far we descend. There is no darkness dark enough, no valley steep enough, no ocean deep enough. There is no bone so dry that God will not breathe it back to life.
In the fourteenth century, an anchorite named Julian sat in a cell attached to a church in Norwich, England. Outside her window, the Black Death was killing a third of Europe. She had watched mass death. She may well have survived the plague herself. She had received sixteen visions from God, and she spent the next twenty years writing them down.
From that cell, having seen what she had seen, Julian wrote this: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
All shall be well. Words that echo the cry of a psalmist millennia before:
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.
More than watchmen wait for the morning.
More than watchmen wait for the morning.
Mesmerizing from the first word to the last. Beautifully written does not seem right, yet it is a kind of deeply beautiful, deeply resonating with my Spirit. I am so grateful for your writing.