What if Death is Not the Enemy?

As we approach Easter more than one preacher is preparing a sermon about God vanquishing the power of sin and death in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The Good News according to this highly Pauline trope is that we no longer need to live in fear of death, "death has lost its sting."  Theologically we are to understand that death is a product of sin and not an intended part of God's design for humanity.  Death is a punishment for human disobedience and another indicator of our alienation from harmony with God.  Sermons may go in many directions at this point assuring folks that death is a doorway to an individual after-life with God in heaven, or that freed from a fear of death we may take the risky path of faithfulness and discipleship here in this life.  I believe these are completely legitimate interpretations.

What if death is not the enemy, however?  The theologian David Ford recently introduced me to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who is a diligent smasher of all idols that we humans routinely mistake for God.  According to Levinas, death itself can become another idol to which we assign an ultimate power and a totalizing explanatory power, such as "most human behavior can be explained by fear of death."  Idols, and totalizing (or reductive) thinking is dangerous for at least two reasons: 1.  Our relation with a living God is obscured and 'managed' when we rely on such limiting constructs, and 2. People are dehumanized, defaced and generalized into a mechanistic series of traits and attributes making us 'manageable' objects more than infinitely unique and valuable subjects. 

What if death is just what happens at the end of life and the resurrection is about something else? This is not only a speculative question.  With a rapidly aging population and massive inflation of health care expenditure especially in the last year of life when massive life-saving and sustaining measures are applied for very little result in increased life-span, this is also a very concrete question.  Ironically enough two-thousand years of preaching the Resurrection has done little to effect our willingness to invest heavily in the extension of our mortal life.  Perhaps this is the case because the trope that says, "Death is the Enemy that Resurrection Defeats" has an odd way of re-empowering death as a totalizing concept, an essential 'bad guy' in the narrative that gains power in the constant retelling.  The glory of the victory depends on the estimation of the enemy.

A few weeks ago we read the story of the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead and I wondered why did Jesus need to die if we already had this proof that God was stronger than death.  Why not celebrate Easter two weeks earlier!  My conclusion is simply that the resurrection is about something more than the generic defeat of death by life - everlasting, seasonal or otherwise.  Resurrection - to borrow heavily from Rowan Williams - is really more about the vindication of one particular life lived in radical faithfulness- indeed union- with God, that of Jesus the Christ.  That Risen Life is then incorporated in a community with a distinct mission of reconciliation, healing and compassion in the world.

One final implication of a re-appraisal of the theological position of death is to wonder how God the Creator's relationship with death changes as a result of the crucifixion of God the Son.  Much theology attempts to distance the 1st person of the Trinity from the suffering and death of the 2nd person.  Classically some atonement theories imply that God the Father requires the blood of the son to satiate God's thirst for recompense.  My notion is that God the Creator fully participated in the suffering and death of Jesus and that in some way the Godhead now includes the reality of death, not as eternal enemy but as a transformed part of ultimate reality.