Meditation on Jesus and Death

Recently, I read the passage in the book of Matthew where John is beheaded and Jesus hears of it. I have never before paid much attention to the verses about Jesus receiving the news, probably because the story of feeding five thousand comes almost immediately afterwards. Book-ended as they are by two such dramatic events—John’s execution and a miracle—I suppose it’s not surprising that I should have overlooked them. But my own experience of loss and sorrow, my recent reading of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and the approach of Easter have somewhat sensitized me to verses about Jesus dealing with death.

In Matthew, it states that after the disciples came and took away John’s body and buried it, they went and told Jesus. When Jesus heard the news, “He departed from there by boat to a deserted place by Himself. But when the multitudes heard it, they followed Him on foot from the cities. And when Jesus went out He saw a great multitude, and He was moved with compassion for them, and healed their sick.” I love how simultaneously spare and rich biblical text is. Jesus went out to a deserted place by himself. Of course he would. He had just learned that his cousin and friend—the man who had recognized him in utero, the man who had baptized him—had been killed by the whimsy of cruel vanity and carelessness. Cruel vanity on the part of Herod’s sister-in-law, and carelessness on the part of Herod. And so Jesus went off to be alone. I imagine him weeping, I imagine him bowed before God in sorrow, not just at the loss of someone whom he deeply loved, but also at the terrible senselessness of it all—a drunken party that ended with a great man’s head on a platter. The depravity and darkness of men’s hearts. And yet he could barely even have a moment to grieve. The people, driven by their own need, followed him, heedless of the distance and the lack of resources. They did not think about food and water. They just walked and walked and walked to follow and be near him. And when they found him, he did not resent or rebuke them for intruding on his sorrow. Instead, in the midst of his own deep grief, he was moved with compassion and met their need. He healed their sick and fed their hunger. In the shadow of his own friend and kinsman’s death, he staved off death for others.

Jesus was always battling death and restoring life during his ministry, telling the bereaved, “do not weep” just before raising the dead one to life. But for all of those he helped and healed (and there were many), there were probably a great many he did not—those at the back of the crowd, those at the next town over who heard about him but could not get to him. Jesus is described as a man of sorrows, and I wonder if part of that sorrow was from carrying all those he did not heal in his heart. Even those he did bring to life would die again, and the same grief of those suffering the loss would be unleashed once more, just at a later date. And he knew that. I think about the story of Mary and Martha weeping for their brother and chiding Jesus for not being there in time to heal him. And the book of John goes on to describe how Jesus “groaned in the spirit and was troubled,” and how when he stood before Lazarus’s tomb, he wept.

After my mother died, I was so comforted by the thought that Jesus truly understood human grief and loss—that even knowing he was about to raise his friend back to life, he was still so troubled and grieved by his friend’s death. But now that I look at it again and really think about the fact that he told Martha that he could and would raise Lazarus from the dead before he wept, I see another possible implication. What if Jesus was weeping not only for the death of Lazarus in that present moment, but also for the death of Lazarus in the future? For all the deaths he had merely postponed? We all want more time with the ones we love. When they die, we think, if only I’d had another week, month, year. We long for them back and think of how much more prepared we would be for their death in the future as long as it were far off. But really, no amount of time would be enough. The end comes, and then we want another extension. Even when someone is old and incapacitated and it is really something of a relief when they die, there is still a sense of longing for them as they were in their prime, a longing for them to be restored to us, and a sorrow that they are no longer a part of this world.

Which brings me to the words Jesus utters before he dies—“It is finished”—also in the book of John. There are many interpretations for what Jesus meant by “it”—his task, his suffering, his work on earth. But maybe “it” refers to death. Even though Jesus healed and raised people from the dead, death was never finished. It was always still lurking in the background, waiting to emerge and reclaim its victims. But with Jesus’ death, death was finished. It is still playing out its course on this earth and in this reality, and its effects are still terrible, still devastating—it is still the enemy. But there is now an endpoint. Death has become finite. For Jesus, the power of death lasted three days. For the rest of us, it is much longer. A thousand years are as a day in the sight of the Lord. But death will not last forever. Its days are numbered. And when Jesus comes again to raise the dead, it’s not going to be temporary—it’s going to be for all eternity.