Death, change & opportunity

The Christian hope is to see death itself as change and opportunity. Saint Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15. 51 – 57 that death is not the end. Life continues beyond death but death involves a change to our life. What changes is that where before our bodies were perishable and mortal, after death they are imperishable and immortal.

What he seems to be saying is that the Christian hope is that the essence of the person survives death in a new existence with a new body and that this new existence provides the opportunity to live a life that is free from sin, guilt and death, the three things that dog and degrade our existence in this life.

There is a poem that is often read at funerals called ‘Death is nothing at all’ which captures something of this in its opening lines: “Death is nothing at all. / I have only slipped away into the next room. / I am I and you are you. / Whatever we were to each other, / that we still are.” But the poem is actually only a small part of a sermon preached by Henry Scott Holland, a Canon of St Pauls Cathedral, which examines the all pervading contradiction that everyone of us faces in times of death.

On the one hand there is the terror of the inexplicable – death is cruel, untoward and irrational – but, on the other hand, there is the inner conviction of personal continuity which death cannot destroy, the feeling that 'death is nothing at all.' Both experiences are real and somehow must be held together in our consciousness.

Holland ends by reassurring his congregation that we need not be afraid because when Jesus returns, as St Paul promises in the passage we heard read, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.' That is the Christian hope and the source of our conviction that death is but an accidental moment that changes nothing.

Holland concludes, “Let the dead things go, and lay hold on life. Purify yourself as Jesus bids you … Then the old will drop away from you, and the new wonder will begin. You will find yourself already passed from death to life, and far ahead strange possibilities will open up beyond the power of your heart to conceive.”

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Nick Cave & Kylie Minouge - Death Is Not The End.