Death and Life (Part 1)

For Anna Węgrzyn

First of all, death is inevitable isn’t it? As Benjamin Franklin quipped a couple of hundred years ago:

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.¹

I wonder now if Franklin was trying to put taxes on the same plane as death so that citizens would accept (however grudgingly) that one is as impossible to resist as the other. After all he was a politician who would have wanted to keep money flowing into government coffers. But then, much later, a wealthy businesswoman named Leona Helmsley reportedly said that "only the little people pay taxes.”² After that Franklin’s doctrine looked very shaky indeed.

But what about the other bit of Franklin’s formula? What about death? Is it as ‘certain’ as Franklin claimed?

In preparation for this article I consulted an oldish source and was surprised by what it says on the topic.

Amongst primitive people the death of a human being is generally regarded as an unnatural process… Death is viewed by primitive people as involving a separation of breath from earth, a separation regarded as a fundamentally reversible process.³

‘Unnatural’ and ‘reversible’, eh? These views probably seem eccentric and ridiculous today. Whether you are a life insurance salesman, a funeral director, or a doctor, death is a serious business.

Or could it be that those ‘primitive people’ had the right idea? Maybe their thinking is just too sophisticated for our literal minds?

Was Jesus Christ also being eccentric (or sophisticated) when, according to the Gospels, he seemed to agree that death is both ‘unnatural’ and ‘reversible’? In fact the official Gospels suggest that Christ didn’t like death at all. This is evident from some of the things he said on the subject. The quotation everyone knows is: “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.”⁴ Jesus went further though. He suggested that God does not like death either. When Christ quoted from the Book of Exodus (“I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”), he added something new to the passage:

He is not God of the dead, but of the living.⁵

It was not only Jesus’ words that led me to question our assumptions about death. His recorded actions are even more significant. On several occasions we are told that Christ brought the dead back to life after he learnt they were deceased. The most famous example is Lazarus, but there are others like the young daughter of Jairus, and the adult son of the Nain widow. Lazarus’ body was already entombed when his sister Martha told Jesus, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.”⁶ In the case of the widow’s son, Christ came upon the hearse bringing the young man to his burial place.⁷ Whatever about Jairus’ daughter, whom Jesus said was merely ‘sleeping’, the other two were definitely dead, or at least believed to be so by their closest kin.⁸

This leaves me with several questions.

Why was Jesus Christ so opposed to death, not just death in a symbolic sense, but physical death? Surely he would have been expected to embrace death as the gateway to paradise? If this had been his attitude, would he not have encouraged his followers to be martyrs? Or did he know something about the consequences of death the rest of us don’t? What are those consequences? Can we ever know, or guess even?

They are questions I will come back to. In the meantime I am reminded of Danny Boyle’s movie, Trainspotting. The film tells the story of a bunch of Scottish heroin addicts and the attempts by one of them, Mark (“Rent Boy”) Renton, to get off the drug. In the opening scene of Trainspotting Renton (played by Ewan McGregor) races through the streets of Edinburgh while (in a voiceover) he lists various elements of today’s consumerist society. Some of these are good, others are bad. But whatever about the benefits of “dental insurance” or “a big fucking television”, there is much to ponder in Renton’s closing words:

Choose your future. Choose life.⁹

Perhaps the scriptwriter intended these words to be interpreted sarcastically, I dont know. But I take a less cynical view of that line. It is as if Renton is not just advocating life over death, he is saying it is, or can be, a matter of personal choice.

Of course there is a problem with this sentiment. Whatever about death being ‘unnatural’ and ‘reversible’, it is ultimately inevitable isn’t it? Surely it is a given that we do not have any control over when we kick the bucket? Those people whom Christ brought back to life presumably died eventually (and stayed dead!). Jesus himself famously ended his days on the cross.

So can we really choose whether to live or die?

(More in Part 2.)

1. J. M. & M. J. Cohen, The New Penguin Dictionary of Quotations (London, 1960-1998), p. 168.

2. Collins Dictionary of Quotations (Glasgow, 2003), p. 348.

3. JFD, ‘Life’ in Chambers Encyclopaedia, (vol. 8, London, 1950), p. 529 (emphases added).

4. Matthew 8:22.

5. Matthew, 22:32.

6. John, 11:39.

7. Luke, 7:11-15.

8. Mark, 5:35-43

9. Trainspotting (1996), director: Danny Boyle.