The Sting of Death

There is incredible power in the resurrection and substitutionary death of the Christian messiah. All of humanity died with The Christ on that cross. That’s the idea. In His death, somehow mystically ALL death is swallowed up, leaving nothing left to fear of death. 

The sting of death is gone! For good. 

Think of the sting as all the fears: death itself, failure, our temporariness, yes even our insignificance, missing our calling. All are swallowed into death, the death of the Sacrificial One. His death becomes our death. But what we die to is not life; we die to death. 

Remember: Death no longer stings. 

If that is true, the fears that once powered over us do so no longer. What is left, instead, is an incredible freedom to explore, to try, to create, to discover. And yes, to fail. We can laugh at failure now, though, because it too has lost its sting.  

That’s right: Failure is directly connected to death.

Death assumes finality. Failure the same, if we define it as a missed opportunity, an opportunity that came and went and now is lost forever. This is an oppressive lie. One we must expose if we are to rightly apply a resurrection view of time. 

If death is defeated, scarcity of time is a lie. Failure is now simply a re-direction.   

Think of it: with death defeated, there is no such thing as failure. The only failure is not trying, lacking faith. The only failure is failure to trust (in yourself and the One behind the Universe). Trust is the heart of faith. Faith assumes the risk of life is worth it. 

Whatever “it” happens to be for you. Death makes a thousand excuses. Death drags us into despair. Death convinces us that “it” (our eternal essence) is not worth it. And eventually, that lack of faith turns into something worse than death: powerlessness.

Always better than the alternative of doing nothing. Risking nothing.

Life itself is at stake in this question: is death defeated? First in the universal sense, then the particular. Does life stand a chance? Can good prevail? Do acts of love and kindness ultimately matter? Do and will our attempts to care amount to anything?

If universally we assume that random chance dictates and the future is totally a crapshoot, it will be impossible to imagine our lives matter. If we are not participating in a potentially winning cause, what are we participating in?  

Life itself, eternal or everlasting life, is that winning cause!   

Yes there are the day to day realities. And sometimes the demands of everyday life cause us to dismiss such lofty questions. The fight to earn enough money and make a “living” to provide overwhelms and can extinguish our existential angst.

But the impulse to “keep your head down” does not foster us through our existential angst, it simply turns our gaze away to ignore it. Which is what we end up doing. We end up ignoring the very parts of ourselves meant to reveal the essential. 

That is not a good idea. (Duh!) It will come back to bite. You can not bribe your own soul, or negotiate with your own ultimate passion. Those things are in there before us.  They stay beyond us.  Ignoring them will only lead to spiting yourself.

Or lead you to incessant daydreaming or fantasy escape. The longings of the soul must be dealth with OR could dangerously lead to serious despair.