Our inevitable death is an opportunity to complete our conformity to the death and resurrection of Jesus
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
As we enter Holy Week and walk with Christ into His Passion, I think it’s important for us to reconceive our approach to death.
Current culture makes at least two important errors concerning death.
The first is simply to avoid it. We don’t think about it, we don’t talk about it, and when it draws near we do as much as possible to hold it off for as long as possible. Death is treated as the ultimate enemy.
The second is an overreaction to the first: If death is inescapable, then we will take as much control over it as possible. We will take death on our own terms, determining exactly when and how we die.
There are deep philosophical reasons why neither of those strategies can satisfy us. But to put the matter most succinctly, we can look at Holy Week and say: Jesus did neither of those things.
And that’s why Holy Week is an opportunity to rethink our approach to death.
Let’s set the stage biblically. In ancient Israel, the Exodus was simply a historical (and wonderful!) fact: Israel went forth from Egypt. As Christians, we also hold that the historical Exodus was a prefigurement. That’s why, at the Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah were talking to Jesus about the “Exodus” that He would accomplish in Jerusalem (see Luke 9). Jesus became the fulfillment of the Exodus by “going forth” from this life to His resurrection.
In that very fulfillment, Jesus also became a pattern for all His disciples. We, too, are called to “go forth” from this world into the promised land of heaven. In baptism we’re brought sacramentally into Jesus’ dying and rising. At death, it happens physically.
Paragraph 1683 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church gives us this helpful image: “The Church who, as Mother, has borne the Christian sacramentally in her womb during this earthly pilgrimage, accompanies him at his journey’s end, in order to surrender him into the Father’s hands.”
Think of that image of birth. When we’re born, we have to leave the world of the womb behind; it’s a dying to the only world we’ve ever known at that point. But we leave it behind in order to enter a greater world — a world of which, up to that point, we’ve only had intimations. Our dying, as the catechism suggests, repeats that process on a new level.
Brothers and sisters, eventually we all have to leave this world behind. We don’t have a choice about that. But, spiritually, that inevitability also carries a gift. As the catechism says, it’s the opportunity to complete our conformity to the death and resurrection of Jesus (see paragraphs 1523 and 1682).
At the moment of His death, Jesus said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” And that’s where we do have a choice. That moment contains an invitation: not to avoid death, because Jesus didn’t; not to seize death and take it on our own terms, because Jesus didn’t; but, finally and completely, to make a willing surrender of our lives into the hands of God, that we might be born into eternal life.
That’s something to ponder during Holy Week.
