"O death, where is thy sting?"
I woke up Easter morning to the news of terror in Sri Lanka: hundreds dead, many hundreds more injured, in a series of coordinated bombing attacks on hotels and Christian churches. I blinked back horror...and then I got up, dressed for Easter services, and went on with my day.
I felt the sting, but it was a small one: a remote horror, the death of people I do not know on the far side of the world. It felt insufficient, this little sting, as if my compassion were too weak to reach across the miles.
Where is your sting, death? It is here, here in the news of hundreds killed. But it is too small.
"O death, where is the sting?"
For Easter services I put on the cream-colored silk jacket that I inherited from him after his death. It is the jacket he's wearing in one of my favorite pictures of him, the picture that was the centerpiece at his memorial service and that depicts him as I most remember him.
It was his favorite jacket for special occasions. In the last decade or more of his life, if the occasion called for dressing up, this jacket was what he'd put on. And I'd joke: "That jacket is mine when you die."
I rarely wear it, because I want it to last. And when I do take it out I see my father and feel afresh his absence. Sometimes it feels like a kind of treason that it doesn't hurt more.
Where is your sting, death? It is here in this pale silk and the memories it evokes.
"O death, where is thy sting?"
I have friends who are staring down the inevitability of death in a way that most of us do not. Confronted with a terminal diagnosis, the truth of human mortality intrudes on their living and in dark moments threatens to paralyze them, to steal away what life they have left--a kind of death before death that they must continually fight against: "You will not take this, too, o death. This day is yet mine to live."
The rest of us know this struggle in a weakened form: the anxiety over strange symptoms or impending storms or trips where so much could go wrong. We hide from it as best we can, but sometimes the inevitability of death rears before us and for a few heartbeats we can't escape it, the sense of a consuming dark. The only question is when: today, tomorrow, thirty years from now?
Where is your sting, death? Here, here in the universal dread.
There are some for whom the dread has faded in the face of something worse: the monotony of lonely hours. Death has taken too many beloved companions, and it's creeping harbinger has stolen away the skills and powers that make living rich and vibrant. And so they sit, reduced to waiting and remembering. Life is something in the past, something gone with the beloved. The fear of death has been replaced by the lonely horror of feeling nothing worth living for.
Where is your sting, death? Here, here in this living death, where death has stung so deep that its victim has come to see death as a welcome escape rather than the architect of the intolerable.
All around us, death stings and stings. And in defiance we lift our voices and say with Paul, "O death, where is the sting?"
We treat it as a rhetorical question.
As if the answer were that it's sting is gone.
As if we didn't feel its sting every day in different ways.
As if the muting of the sting were born of our faith, our capacity to grasp the deeper truths that assure us that death is weaker than life, when in truth it is born of sin, of our failure to care enough.
And yet we lift our voices in defiance and triumph, an exercise in holy pretense. We cry it into existence, this self who has no fear of death--that has lost its fear not because of despair, not because of insufficient compassion, but because we have seized upon a joy more powerful than death.
The joy eludes us. Death keeps stinging us. And yet in heroic, sacred, audacious hope, we keep reaching for that world where death has lost its victory and joy will have no end.
"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" 1 Corinthians 15:55
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