Where is your Sting?

There is, I promise you, nothing romantic about death. While functioning as a hospital chaplain during my clinical pastoral education a couple of years ago, I was able to see death from what some might consider an uncomfortably close position. I assure you, there were no tearful last words or lingering gazes of love as the soul left the body. Instead, there were weeping relatives, loudly beeping machines, and the "death rattle” - the sound of air entering lungs rapidly filling with fluid. The sound is something like the sound made when a cup is emptied while drinking through a straw. There is no doubt about what the sound means. Once you hear it, it is undeniable that death looms near. The moment of death can be almost unnoticed. The breathing becomes shallower, and the space between breaths can feel like an eternity. Anxiety builds between each breath. As the seconds pass, you become certain that the last breath has been taken – then there is another. Finally, a breath is taken and even though you wait, almost holding your own breath waiting for another, no new breath is taken. Outwardly, the person looks much the same as they did only moments before. They are, however, no longer a person. They are a shell, a body, now waiting to be rejoined to the soul at the end of time.

Death is not romantic, nor should it be. It is ugly. It is as ugly as sin. It is the reward of sin. And yet, because of Jesus Christ, we can sing, “O Death, where is your victory, where is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55) This ugliness of death can be transformed. Christian hope, it would seem, is tied up in this mystery.

“Why,” you may ask, “am I writing about death?”

This January, my classmates and I are doing a seminar in ministry to families. To date, we have spent a lot of time considering crisis moments, particularly those surrounding death. We have visited a funeral home that prepares around 3000 bodies yearly and have met with parish staff members who help mourners in their grief. We have read books, prayed prayers, and talked. And still, despite St. Paul’s jubilant outburst, death does sting. Those who die suffer on the way, and those whom they leave bear their own form of suffering. What then, is to be the meaning of human suffering?

The answer is obvious – Jesus Christ, with whom we are united in baptism, and with whom we are more closely united through our suffering, he is the only way to make sense of the experience. But words are cheap. How is such an understanding of death, dying, and suffering appropriated on the individual level? Answering that question, I think, will consume much of my ministry.