The News We Will Never Be Ready To Hear

And why this news continues to jolt us deeply

This past Tuesday, Patti and I received news that a friend of 17 years who had been active, healthy, vibrant, and fully present at home and at play and at work and in worship, was abruptly called Home by Jesus at the age of 49. This news came after a string of other losses including my father who passed away a year ago last Thursday, then Tim Keller, then Patti’s mother, then pastor Bryan Dunagan at age 44.

We all processes death in our own way, especially when it hits close to home. For me, the only sane thing is returning to Scripture regarding its meaning for times past, present, and future.

Hold your loved ones closely today, and remind yourself that each breath is a gift. As you do, also remember that our “last enemy” is utterly dreadful, but it does not get the last word and it is not the end.

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I am now in my fifties, which means I am likely closer to the day of my death than I am the day of my birth.

Once a two-sport athlete whose days were filled with strength, determination, unlimited energy, and marathon runner’s resting heart rate, I am now more tired and less vibrant than I used to be. Part of that is because of insomnia, but it’s also a function of getting older. Now more than ever, I feel what Albert Camus called “the bitter taste of the mortal state” and what the Apostle Paul called “the groan of creation.”

But even for those in midlife, some things remain constant. Easter’s promise echoes every year and the Lord’s Supper makes room for us every week. Before The Supper, local fellowships join other saints around the world by reciting the truth that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again. These words are anchored in history. They are trustworthy and true, and present us with a paradox that is both disturbing and hopeful:

“Though I die, yet shall I live.” (John 11:25)

According to Scripture, when we die, we will not be buried in the dirt forever but will only be planted there for a time. Our mortal bodies, now tarnished by weariness, will be like fertile seeds in waiting. Once resurrected, our bodies will assume all the features of immortality, full redemption, unending momentum, untarnished flourishing, and imperishable bliss. We are now and forevermore united with Jesus who is the resurrection and the life. Because Jesus lives and will never die again, the same must be true of us.

It must be true, provided that we have received the gift of faith. Even the smallest amount of faith in Jesus is plenty. Why is this so? Because it is not the strength, nor the quality, nor the quantity of our faith that will get us Home. Rather, it is the strength, quality, and quantity of God’s immeasurable goodness and grace and faithfulness that gets us Home.

Whether our faith is big or small, a constant or constantly needled with doubt, an arena for angst or a refuge for peace, a tiny mustard seed is all that’s called for. It is not our fitness to be saved that seals our standing with Christ, but his fitness to save us. It is not our repentance that leads him to be kind toward us, but his kindness that leads us to be repentant toward him. (Romans 2:4) His kindness toward us is tender, gentle, and lowly in heart. At the same time, his kindness is filled with earth-shaking, death-defying power.

“Your brother will rise again,” Jesus told the grieving and doubting Martha, still undone by the death and burial of her beloved brother and Jesus’s beloved friend, Lazarus. “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:23-26)

There is no more important question than this. Does Martha believe, do you believe, do I believe … this?

Death is harsh because it reminds us that in a fallen world, we are not in control and never were. Because of this, none of us will exit this world unscathed, untarnished, and unrattled—not Job with his great wealth, not David with his great conquests, not Solomon with his great splendor, not Hannah and Ruth and Mary with their great virtue, and not even Jesus with his great perfection.

The breath you just took is one more toward your last. As Anne Lamott famously said, in one hundred years it will be all new people. Life is wondrous and supremely difficult, and then we die. Nobody, even the Author of Life himself, gets to escape our last enemy, which is death.

That is, until some of us do escape it.

In a letter he wrote from prison while awaiting execution for opposing Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his Letters and Papers from Prison that death is “the supreme festival on the road to freedom.”

The Welsh-born poet and priest, George Herbert, expressed similar hope when he said that death used to be an executioner, but the gospel makes it into a gardener. The following lines from his famous poem, “Death,” expound on this hopeful thought:

Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,
Nothing but bones,
The sad effect of sadder groans…

But since our Savior’s death did put some blood
Into thy face,
Thou art grown fair and full of grace,
Much in request, much sought for as a good.

For we do now behold thee gay and glad,
As at Doomsday;
When souls shall wear their new array,
And all thy bones with beauty shall be clad.

Therefore we can go die as sleep, and trust
Half that we have
Unto an honest faithful grave;
Making our pillows either down, or dust.

In Christ, we have been given a hope that transcends and ultimately defeats human mortality. Because his life, death, burial, resurrection, and promises are all trustworthy and true, an eternal “weight of glory” awaits us.

As Scripture attests:

“We do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:16-18)

Any regret, hurt, fear, and subsequent weariness we experience today is a prelude to the lives we will enjoy, in complete absence of these and all other ills, in the coming New Heaven and New Earth. The current and coming chapters of our lives—including the ones that seem demoralizing or terminal—are but middle chapters in the Story of God.

The final chapter, which still awaits us, has also been written and published and cannot be revised or deleted. It turns even the most tragic stories into the Happily Ever After Story that is actually true. It is world-without-end, an imperishable bliss that will put all that is bent, bruised, and broken into permanent rear view. It will be, as singer-songwriter Jeremy Casella has said, like death in reverse.

To our present and wearied selves, such promises feel more out of reach than they do real. Perhaps this is because the world that still is prevents us from fathoming the world that will be. Or perhaps we are more preoccupied with what must happen to us first, before those promised times of flourishing peace become our norm: “It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.” (Hebrews 9:27)

Death is, on the one hand, a formidable and brutal enemy. It is fierce, fracturing, and laden with heaviness. Even Jesus, the one who holds the power to conquer death, paused to grieve and weep and rage at what death had done to his beloved friend, Lazarus, and to the community of mourners it left in its wake. Jesus also registered wailing cries of pain and protest concerning his own death on the cross.

But the news surrounding death is also an invitation to consider hope for the people of God. Like the excruciating pain of labor and delivery before childbirth, like the darkness before the dawn, and like winter before springtime, the coldness and fury and pain of death is also a pathway to the kind of life we were made to have.

Death is not the end for us, but is rather the final leg of our bent, busted up, guilt-gutted, hurt-hindered, fear-wearied existence in a fallen world. There is no bypass road around it. It cannot be avoided. To experience joy, abundance, and the freedom of unfettered, unrestrained, and uninterrupted life, we must first journey through death’s dark valley. Death is not only the wages of sin, which have already been covered on our account by Jesus, but is also a necessary byproduct of what Scripture calls the groan of creation, in which every person, place, and thing has been made subject, at least for now, to death and decay. (Romans 8:18-25)

So what is the good news here? It is this…

The central motive of Christ’s mission was love, which compelled him to lay down his life to ensure for all God’s people that death would die, burials would be buried, terminal conditions would be terminated, and endings would end.

The good news in the face of our temporary yet horrific news: Jesus Christ conquered and rejected death with a holy rejection. He hates death with a holy hatred. There is a confidence and comfort to be had in this. On the other side of death, all of us who are in Christ will be able, once and for all and forever, to put erosive and life-sucking vandals like death, mourning, crying, and pain in the rearview.

And so we say, “Come Lord Jesus.”

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The original version of this reflection first appeared in Beautiful People Don’t Just Happen in a chapter called “Though I Die.”

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