Death, just like life, in the secular and pagan realm, but even in the Christian realm, insofar as the latter mirrors the former—and it does at ubiquitous levels—is thought of in abstract and wondrous terms; indeed, in fearful terms. But for the Christian all things have been resurrected; including our dead bodies. We are now of the ‘firstborn from the dead,’ Jesus Christ. But this is to the point: when we contemplate our own mortality, which most of us attempt to hideaway from, most of us conjure some type of ethereal somethingness “out there,” that doesn’t seem real to us. That is to say, death is such a seemingly faceless enemy, bringing with it the abyss of the unknown, that we attempt to flee from it in whatever way we can; even if that way is, ironically, just living more fully and out of the death our bodies inhabit and participate in from this to that moment of every single day of our lives. When we think about death, in general, it seems so outlandish to us, at a personal level, that to contemplate it for too long either descends into the morbid or insanity. Personal death, as death in general, represents a limit that human beings were not constructed for, ultimately. And yet this is our status in this current time between now and not yet. And so, outside of Christ, we attempt to withdraw into other things, things that keep us from thinking too constantly about our transitory statuses. It is a scary thing, death that is, for a people who were ultimately created to be in eternal union and fellowship with our Creator, with our Father, in the Son, by the Holy Spirit, to not live and out of that bond of union that God has re-created for us (post-fall) in Christ, in order that He might elevate us to the heights and weight that He has always already shared with the Father in the bond of love wooed by the Holy Spirit. Barth says more:
What is the justification for this negative aspect of our being? What is the basis of the profound necessity of human fear in face of death? It is obviously to be found in the fact that death is an enemy with its own destructive purpose and power to which we have rightly fallen a prey in virtue of God’s right against us, and the wrong which we have done Him. This means, of course, that we are threatened in the frontier of our being by the negation which corresponds to the power and purpose of this enemy. But it also means that in death we are confronted not only with death itself but also with God; with the very God who is in the right against us and against whom we have done wrong. In death He demands that which we still owe Him. He threatens us with the payment which we have deserved. It is not any negation which threatens us in death. It is not a harmless, neutral and finally welcome negation as imagined by Buddha and his kindred. It is the very dangerous and painful negation of our nothingness before God. If this were not so, if death were a tyrant in its own right, we could await it with secret equanimity or even open defiance. But it is not a tyrant in its own right. It rules only but precisely at the point where God is in the right against His creature and His creature is in the wrong against Him. It reigns in the no man’s land where God is in conflict with man and man with God. It rules with the authority and power of the Law of God obtaining even in this no man’s land. In the rule of death we have to do with the rule of God. It is really our nothingness in His sight which is revealed in the destructive work of death. This is what makes this work so ineluctable, so bitter and terrible. Our end is not a tolerable evil, but the great and serious and intolerable evil, to the extent that in our opposition to God we draw upon ourselves God’s opposition to us. In its perhaps concealed but very real basis our fear of death is the well-grounded fear that we must have of God.[1]
In other words, as Barth rightly notices, death is really coming to terms with the fact that fallen humans harbor sweet kiss me nots for the ‘nothingness’ of their own lives; at least, as we perceive them to be: i.e., our own lives. Death is the comeuppance all of humanity has indeed deserved, before the Holy and living God. And yet, the Evangel, the Good News! is that Christ has faced and conquered this comeuppance for us. He has already entered into the ditch of death, faced it, accepted its ‘wandering star-ness as if in the darkness of space,’ and shone the bright light of the Sun of righteousness to it; thus, dispelling its wretched cursedness with the bounty of His life, the ever-eternal life-spring that flows upward into the bosom of the Father for the eternity of His life now with ours.
People feign a ‘no fear’ attitude, often, when the reality of death is brought up; even in the face of their own mortality (as I saw when I was being treated with others for cancer). And yet deep down ‘eternity has been set in our hearts,’ as such to be faced with the reality of a faceless non-eternity, such as a Christless death necessarily presents someone with, becomes such an assault on all that “appears” and “feels” real, that it is dashed on the rocks of the wishfulness of fallen humanity’s imaginaries. That is to say, as independent, self-possessed, and thus fallen human beings, we would rather die outside of Christ, and be able to hold onto our own “precious” selves, even into the depths of a nothingness we really have no possible knowledge of. A fallen humanity would rather die, with hopes of escaping the living God, if this only means that somehow, someway such humanity might finally achieve Übermensch status; indeed, transcending death itself, and finally ascending to the heights of divinity they always knew they possessed in themselves; as if a ‘spark.’
[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §47 [608] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 168.