Making an Enemy of Death

When it comes to preparing for death, very many respected and intelligent--as well as devoutly Christian--people have proposed the virtue of "making friends with death." I believe I do understand the sentiment--to put away all fear of death and embrace it (as one would a friend) as an inevitable and natural reality. I also see the pastoral value of such a sentiment.

But the Scriptures portray death in a much different way: death is the enemy--the final enemy, in fact, to be destroyed by Christ. Death is the "wages of sin," and only enters the natural order when catalyzed by blatant disobedience of the God who is life itself. Further, Jesus came that we may have life, and have it in abundance...to take away the sting of death. 

In this Lenten season, now halfway gone, I propose we be careful not to make death too close a friend. Is death inevitable? Yes. Is it natural? It is now, yes. But living as creatures united to Christ and his death through baptism, we are called to live the heavenly reality in the here-and-now. We are to be blessed (and to receive comfort) by mourning sin and death. Because of the friend we have in Jesus, death, still the enemy, is made supremely impotent. Christ's perfect love, evermore being perfected in our hearts, drives out the fear of death. Indeed, Jesus' own death on our behalf transforms death from being a terrible end to being merely a transition to a new beginning--from being the hopeless dead end to being the entrance to eternal life. As Christians, our role is not so much to become friends with death as it is to laugh in its face, for it has been exposed as what it truly is--the powerless enemy of Almighty God.