"Death, thou shalt die."

Fr. Bill is a retired priest from the church I am interning at this summer.  He is in hospice and has Alzheimer's.  This afternoon, I went with a deacon to visit him and bring him Communion.  His wife greeted us, and we asked if Fr. Bill would like to receive Communion.  He was agitated when we got there, but she thought that he would appreciate it.  So we read the short service for "Communion in Special Circumstances," and the deacon put the Host in Fr. Bill's mouth.  He did not want it, and spit it out on the floor.  His wife gathered the chewed pieces up, saving them to try again later, and failing that, to bury them outside.  We finished the prayers with some difficulty, as he was becoming more agitated and mumbling incoherently. As we were saying goodbye, Fr. Bill opened his clear, blue eyes and looked straight at me, and so I introduced myself to him and he seemed to understand.  Then right before we left, he got very upset and his face contorted in an expression of anger and fear I will never forget.  "Damn, damn, damn," he kept murmuring. He quieted as his wife stroked his face and patted his chest.  She thanked us as we left the room.

Visiting Fr. Bill drove home to me the reality that death is an enemy.  The ravages of Alzheimer's--and sickness and suffering generally--are signs of death savaging the goodness of human life.  While in one sense, death is natural because humans are mortal creatures, the ways in which it arrays itself against human flourishing makes it an enemy.  St. Paul named death "the last enemy" (1 Cor 15:26).

But Christian hope is that, through Jesus' resurrection from the dead, death has been defeated, and on the last day, when the dead are raised to new life, it will be no more.  Death is an enemy, yes, but a vanquished enemy that will be destroyed (see 1 Cor 15:26, 54-55; Rev 21:3-4). As John Donne put it, "Death, thou shalt die." Death will be no more, precisely because of bodily resurrection; if only "the soul" survived death, then death would still be victorious over the body.  But resurrection hope insists that the body will be raised to a new, transformed life.  Christian hope insists on God's commitment to the whole person.

Resurrection hope is a sure and certain hope, proved by God raising Jesus from the dead.  Contrast this with the vain attempt to engineer a permanent life exemplified by "the Singularity Movement" so popular these days in Silicon Valley (see here).  Resurrection hope is certain because God is trustworthy.

Resurrection hope is good news.  Good news for people suffering from death's onslaught, people like Fr. Bill.  Alzheimer's remains devastating and horrifying, but it is not victorious.  Rather, because the living God has conquered death in and through Christ, Fr. Bill will live with Christ forever (Rom 6:3-11).

In the meantime, I mourn for Fr. Bill and his fear and pain and brokenness.

[NB: This post is cross-posted from my recent post on the Divinity Affinity blog.]