If a Man Die

Millennia ago a pain-strapped farmer in the Middle East put a monumental question: “If a man die, shall he live again?” The last half of that question triggers controversy among men, not the first half; for unquestionably a man will die. The silence of mankind’s fallen millions proves it. Marshalling his ingenuity to outmaneuver death, dreaming of some scientific breakthrough that will make him immortal, man keeps on dying.

Occasionally a magazine article deals with how death is managed in America. But almost inevitably the writer discusses only what the survivors do about the dead; he says nothing about how the dying manage. Dying is a very personal matter. When the President of the United States was assassinated a few years ago, the news of his death was heard in all the corners of the earth. Yet thousands knew nothing of his passing, for these thousands were busy with their own dying.

“Is not death the great adventure still?” asked James Elroy Flecker. The great adventure, indeed, and a very serious one. Men may at times speak flippantly of death, but they do not do so in its presence. Everywhere on earth solemnity still marks the appearance of man’s final foe. And the burial of a fellow man fires in us the realization of the limited boundaries of our earthly existence.

Yet, despite the universality and inevitability of death, it is rarely a conversation piece. We shrink from meditation on what Herman Hagedorn called “the quiet shutting, one by one, of doors.” Death is not a desirable topic for politicians, and we’d prefer to have our preachers avoid dwelling on it in sermons. Even doctors, who live with death and whose business is to stay men’s dying, are not chatty on the subject. Still we never can efface death from our thinking. Often when we pause from our frenetic goings-on and are alone, the “last enemy” scratches at our consciousness. Edna St. Vincent Millay said, “This I do, being mad/Gather my baubles about me/Sit in circle of toys, and all the time/Death is beating the door in.” Whatever diversion we may employ, over and over we become aware of that beating on the door. And again and again the Scriptures warn us to prepare for it.

“If a man die, shall he live again?” This momentous question was asked ages before it received an authentic answer. The answer came in from a Man who was en route to his own ugly death on a gallow-beam! He had not come to meet death with philosophy or theology, or even with faith or hope. He would meet it in person and break the ancient enemy’s grip on mankind by the awesome business of dying and living again! Should he succeed in that mission unprecedented, then all who believed in him could have a passage to eternal aliveness. “Because I live,” the Man said, “you shall live also.”

A quotation from the April 6, 1970, issue of Newsweek might make impressive pulpit material for Easter 1972:

U.S. physicians rarely face up to the enigma of death; neither, for that matter, do most theologians. Their typical American tendency to substitute morality for metaphysics betrays a profound loss of theological nerve—a deeper denial of that hope in God that has always fired the radical religious imagination. “It was not the morality of the Sermon on the Mount which enabled Christianity to conquer Roman paganism” observed Germany’s maverick Marxist philosopher, Ernst Bloch, “but the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead.” In an age when Roman senators vied to see who could get the most blood of a steer on their togas—thinking this would prevent death—Christianity was in competition for eternal life, not for morality [p. 88A].

However insistently the instruments in the New Testament symphony sing of ethics, it is the Resurrection trumpet that rings highest and clearest. No sermon or sermon-fragment reported by the chroniclers of the early Church is without that trumpet. For those first believers, if Christ could be kept entombed, Christianity could be locked up with him. Nothing mattered if Christ had not outwitted death—nothing! They kept saying, “Christ died.” But they had to say more than that, or the great dream was ended. Either the grave won or Christ won; and if the grave won, all men were yet in their sins and the Church was a pitiable institution! But if Christ won, then men could not only walk in newness of life but live forever. Everything depended on whether the bastion of death stood or fell. Those believers kept singing up and down the world that the bastion had given way: Jesus was “declared Son of God by a mighty act in that he rose from the dead” (Rom. 1:4, NEB).

Christ spoke as had no other man. He cured incurables, hushed hurricanes, fed multitudes with a handful of bread; but it was when he cracked the fortress of death that he “led captivity captive” and gave incomparable hope to grave-bound mankind. The Christian sign is the naked Cross; but without the empty tomb standing over against it, the Cross, in a redemptive sense, is powerless. So are the birth in a cattle-cave, the Message on the Mount, the miracles, and the sacraments. The Apostle Paul insisted that if Christ had not put death down, Christians “of all men are the most miserable.”

But the Apostle’s word rose to an exultant shout: Christ had conquered the enemy, death. He had turned that dead-end street into a freeway to eternal life. Ages after the Apostle’s time, Christians cried, “Christ is risen!” And Christians who heard that cry answered, “Christ is risen indeed!”

May we this Easter, from our hearts, echo that cry. May we walk as men who hear the jangling of keys that open cosmic doors, and live as those who hear a Voice saying, “Don’t be afraid! I am the first and the last. I am the living one! I was dead, but look, I am alive for ever and ever. I have the authority over death and the world of the dead” (Rev. 1:17–19, Good News for Modern Man). May we take Easter out to a dying world!

Quickening

Dead trees draw life

when the days expand and the sun

fulfills its promise, oft delayed

by the clutch of ice.

Clotted, gnarled, knotted twigs

on the trees sense sap and the death

of death. They stretch, begin

to puff green on the end.

Men sing new songs

of a Life laid down for rebirth

when Easter is the Spring

and the branch is Christ.

MARK NOLL

Lon Woodrum is an evangelist in the United Methodist Church and a writer. He lives in Hastings, Michigan. He has written nearly threescore books and 2,000 articles.

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