Our need for death

NOVEMBER again is here, and like an automatic reaction, thanks to our long Christian tradition, our thoughts go to those who have gone ahead of us, whose remains we visit in the cemeteries or columbaries.

It’s a moving sight that bespeaks of our faith in the life after death. Thanks to God, the mystery that shrouds death and even our own shortcomings, mistakes and sins, cannot dispel such faith.

We just have to go deeper in our knowledge about death. For this, we need the our Christian faith to guide us, so we can have the proper attitude and understanding of what some saints have regarded as Sister Death who is joyfully welcomed.

We should not be afraid of death. In fact, we have to expect it and prepare ourselves for it. It cannot be avoided anyway. But even more significant is that we have to realize that we need it. Therefore, our attitude should be that of longing for it, and not just waiting for it and even wanting to escape from it.

This was the attitude of Christ. “Jesus, knowing that his hour was come, that he should pass out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them unto the end.” (Jn13,1)

It should be ours too. Of course, with Christ, who has complete and perfect knowledge and control of his life and death, we can say it is understandable. But we also need to understand that we actually have to conform our attitude toward death to that of Christ’s.

We would be out on a limb in our attitude toward death if we fail to refer it to Christ’s death. We’d be left only with our shallow and narrow human understanding of it, crawling with fears, sadness and a host of intense emotions that would still miss the origin and purpose of our death.

There might be a tinge of faith infused into it, but a faith that is more of a wish out of desperation than one with any objective basis. It’s time we outgrow this kind of attitude and understanding.

If we have already conquered many frontiers of human sciences and technology, we should start conquering our last frontier of death—not by any human science and technology though, but by faith, and by God’s grace.

That is not a presumptuous, gratuitous claim. In the beginning, as our faith teaches us, we were not meant to die. Nor in the end of time are we supposed to die. There is going to be the resurrection of the dead, a truth of faith that is now a mystery incapable of being proven and verified in a human way.

Death came because of the sin of men, first, that of our aboriginal parents which we inherited, and of course our own personal sins. But this death has been conquered by Christ through the cross. “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.” (1 Cor 15,22)

We have to understand that our death should not be understood simply as the end of our earthly life, the failure of our physical health. Our death is much more than that. It has a deep theological meaning that we should try to be more familiar with, since we have a big part to play in that death.

Yes, we have to work for our death. We just cannot wait for it to come, and even try to dodge it if we can.

In this, we can try to develop the attitude Christ had toward death, expressed in his words: “No one takes my life away from me. I lay it down of myself, and I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.” (Jn 10,18)

How did Christ die? By dying on the cross, which means he assumed all the sins of men, from beginning to end, big and small, and died to them only to resurrect and win over sin and death on the third day.

Our faith teaches that if we die with Christ, we will also resurrect with him. Dying with Christ means dying to our sin. In other words, we need to be dead to sin, so we can resurrect with Christ.

Thus, in his first letter, St. Peter said: “Christ bore our sins in his body upon the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live to justice.” (2,24)

This is the death we need to accomplish—our death to sin!