A COMEDY ABOUT DEATH
Photo from Unsplash.
The one podcast I listen to every week without fail is Dear Hank and John. It is a show in which, as Hank informs the listener every week, two brothers answer your questions, give you dubious advice, and bring you all the week’s news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. For a stretch of time in 2016 and occasionally thereafter, Hank’s introduction also referred to the show as “a comedy podcast about death.” This phrase struck me the first time I heard it, and it has stayed close to my heart ever since, because I find it to be an apt description of Christianity.
After all, Christians (inasmuch as one can generalize about us) are rather death-obsessed. Speaking from an Episcopal perspective, our two most solemn days of the year are about Our Lord’s death (Good Friday) and our own (Ash Wednesday). We speak of baptism as death, of dying to self and to sin. The Rite II Burial Office declares that “in the midst of life we are in death.” A not insignificant amount of doctrine has to do with the next world, which we will only see when we’ve ceased to be alive in this one. Ashes to ashes. Memento mori.
I have had friends from other religious traditions ask me why Christians are so focused on death and what comes after, instead of this world and what we can do in it now. It’s a fair question, particularly given the tendency, in certain highly visible corners of Christendom, to focus on whether one personally will be allowed to appear before the presence of God. This world and how we act in it are often unduly neglected in favor of the question of personal fate, as if our own salvation had nothing to do with that of our neighbors. Christ in fact commands us to do many things in this world while we are in it, and a life in God cannot, by definition, be self-centered (c.f. that whole “dying to self” business). And yet, no matter how we spend our time in this world, eventually we will pass out of it. We’re all going over Jordan, in the end.
One of the great beauties of Christianity is that it addresses this reality straight on and engages with it extensively. It both enables one to look death in the face without flinching and extends compassion when one (perhaps inevitably) does flinch.
This is where the “comedy” part comes in.
It is a truism of theatre studies that, at least in the Western dramatic tradition, a play being called a “comedy” doesn’t mean that it’s funny. It means that it ends with a wedding, or the promise of one. (This is how a play like All’s Well that Ends Well gets classified as a comedy, even though the marriage of its intelligent and resourceful heroine to one of the greatest cads Shakespeare ever wrote causes me to dispute the veracity of the play’s title.)
I prefer to think of Christianity as a comedy more in line with Much Ado About Nothing, which, in addition to actually being amusing, has a (mostly) satisfying resolution after an intensely painful fourth act. Just as comedies are not guaranteed to be funny, they are also not guaranteed to pull any of their emotional gut punches. In the middle of a wedding ceremony that has turned into an abusive tirade on the part of the would-be groom, Benedick observes, “This looks not like a nuptial.”
The same observation can easily be made about our world. Here we are, creatures beloved by God, cherished as individuals and called by name, living in a world created by the word and will of that same lover of our souls. And yet we live alongside fear and greed, sin and yes, death.
I go to a funeral and shudder at how small the box that contains the ashes of the deceased is. That dust used to be someone. That dust will one day be me. Distress is an understandable reaction to this fact, and so is grief. Christians are often very good at death—the Burial Office in The Book of Common Prayer is, in my opinion, the crown jewel of the pastoral offices—but we are not always so good at grief. It can be easy to ask what we have to mourn if the dead now see God face to face, while we are still stuck looking through our glass darkly. It is not uncommon to encounter this sentiment at funerals, from both clergy and congregants. Sometimes it is followed by a reminder that tears are a gift from God, but even then, the well-meaning admonishment tends to stick in my head.
But how could we not grieve? The people who once walked next to us are not here anymore in a way that we can see and touch. We are creatures of flesh who can only remember our existence in a body, and the person we are burying no longer exists in the only way we know how to exist—and one day it will be our turn. One day we too will be gone, and while we will know then what the dead know now, for the moment that knowledge remains unreachable. Even though Christians believe our fondest hope of life is found in death, death is still a calamity. Jesus wept at it. If death were not a catastrophe we would not need Jesus to save us from it.
And save us he has. We, like Peter, cry out to him, and we find ourselves being grasped by the arms and hauled up out of the churning waves. We worship a God who knows the sharp knife of grief, who understands all our sorrows. I like to think Jesus has personal experience with that unpleasant throbbing sensation you get behind your eyes when you’ve being crying hard for an extended period of time.
We also walk with the entire communion of saints, who are not bound by time or by death. My favorite way to explain this communion to people who ask me about it is to say that I ask a saint to pray for me the same way I would ask any friend, except that is particular friend is in the next world instead of this one. They’re, you know, dead. But it doesn’t matter, for Christ has overcome the sharpness of death.
This looks not like a nuptial. The wedding feast is yet to come.
But it is surely coming. The most solemn day of the year is only the second of the Great Three Days. Our faces are turned toward the sun, toward Christ, toward that morning garden made up of the same dirt from which God formed us. God has promised us life in Her, and that She will wipe every tear from our eyes. Scripture teaches us, over and over again, that God is a God who keeps Her promises. It is because of this that we can look death in the face and say, with all the insolence of God’s beloved children, “O grave, where is thy victory.”
In the midst of life we are in death, but it’s a comedy, and the bridegroom is at hand.
