Good Friday, Death, and Christian Life
O, Death
Won’t you spare me over til another year
Well what is this that I can’t see
With ice cold hands takin’ hold of me
Well I am death, none can excel….
These are lyrics from the widely-known song “O, Death” a haunting melody that became famous after it was featured in the movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou? The song, so expertly sung by Ralph Stanley in what is almost a Gregorian chant to the power of death, is haunting precisely because it expresses so well the natural human fear of death.
But is it true that death something that “none can excel”? Is death really “the final word” over human life? Or is there another word that God has to say on the matter?
In the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), we read that: “It is in the face of death that the riddle a human existence grows most acute. Not only is man tormented by pain and by the advancing deterioration of his body, but even more so by a dread of perpetual extinction.” Faced with the reality of death, we rightly ask: “What will become of all that I have worked for? What will happen to all those I have loved?” The unavoidable reality of death seems to make human life meaningless. “Why am I here,” we ask, “if in the end, it all comes to nothing?”
In the Scriptures, death is the enemy. It is the companion of sin, and they both must be overcome together. Rather than counseling the faithful simply to accept death as a fact of life, or to welcome death as a gift, Gaudium et Spes tells us that the human person “rightly follows the intuition of his heart when he abhors and repudiates the utter ruin and total disappearance of his own person.” It is thus a very human and very understandable reaction to death for the poet Dylan Thomas to beg his dying father to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Go not gently into that dark night.” Why? Because God has put us in the seeds of something eternal: a yearning for Himself.
“Human beings bear in themselves,” Gaudium et Spes tells us, “an eternal seed which cannot be reduced to the merely material.” It is precisely because we are not merely material that we yearn for something beyond the death of our finite human bodies. It is especially when we look at a man or woman in a wheelchair or an elderly grandmother whose body has withered and failed in so many ways, yet still feel in their presence the power of their indomitable spirit, that we know there is something in the human person not restricted to the current weakness of our material bodies.
