“Then comes the end, when [Christ] hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after He
has destroyed every ruler and every authority and every power. For He must reign until He
has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death”
(I Corinthians 15:24)
It’s early morning, hours before dawn. Again I cannot sleep. It was exactly fifty years ago less a few months when Mom and I would bundle young John in a blanket and toss him in the back seat of our Chrysler, then drive around anywhere and nowhere until the blessed sunrise would allow us to face the day without Dad. Now it’s the same feeling, only I don’t have Mom alongside—she’s gone to be with Dad. I’ve completed college, seminary and graduate school in the meanwhile, besides having conducted hundreds of funerals; nevertheless, I haven’t exhausted the same childlike enigma [not childish—only children are pure enough to ask the deepest questions]: Why must we die? I know St. Paul’s answer, and I understand the Church’s profound explanation. Indeed, I’ve been sharing this trauma with mourners for more than forty years—yet it remains a mystery. It goes like this:
Death happens because of sin. It comes as punishment, or “wages of sin,” according to St. Paul—but it’s also a remedy for sin. Only by death can we be restored, not just to God, but also to our whole being. Our souls and bodies were made to be with God and to be an integral unity of who we are essentially. But after sinning, the sinful life we now even take for granted as normal is brought to an end. We are purified by death, as hard to believe as that may be, and our resurrection is now made possible.
Think of it this way: Imagine you were in the Garden of Eden and the serpent bit your leg. You or your partner might place a tourniquet above the affected place, preventing the venom from spreading through your body. You could then be saved. But it wasn’t that way at all. Our ancestors were convinced that by disobeying God they were doing something good and worthwhile. They chose to violate God’s demand. They imbibed the fruit of sin of their free will. Ever since, we all have been confused, wanting to restore that original innocence, yet realizing like St. Paul, that “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). My will is constantly confused, and it will remain like this until I die. I’m not capable of steering a consistent course through this lifetime without running aground time and again on the reefs of sin. It’s like the many viruses in this computer I’m writing on that wouldn’t be eradicated until the machine was stripped of all its hardware and software, then reinstalled. St. Gregory of Nyssa put it like this: “Death was introduced into human nature by God’s providence with a specific purpose—so that by dissolving soul and body, evil may be drawn off and the human may be reshaped again by the resurrection, whole, freed of passions, pure and without any ingredients of evil.”
So then the bodies of my parents—Dad a half century ago and Mom yesterday—will like my own body one day enter the earth and decompose in order that the Creator will be able to compose our bodies purified and made acceptable for an everlasting life in His Kingdom. In this way I welcome death—yes, it’s the reward of sin, put ironically, while it’s also the antidote that nullifies and eradicates the sin accrued through a life in this world so permeated with evil. “Who will free me from this body of Death? Thanks to be God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24)