“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” 1 Corinthians 15:55
My dad is dying in hospital. There you go. I said it. Which is something that the medical staff find very hard to do.
So, last week, when it looked like he only had a few minutes to live, a young doctor ushered me into a side room to let me know how serious things were. But all she could manage to he say was the end was near (which it transpired it wasn’t).
The next up the medical food chain, the registrar, said later that we were in “the end of life phase”. The top dog, the consultant, said that “he is very unwell”. No one felt able to say to your father is going to die soon.
Since our culture has abandoned even lip service to the Christian hope of life after death in heaven, death has become the great unmentionable. It is like Voldemort, the evil wizard of Harry Potter fame. If you say his name then somehow he has power over you. So it appears with death. We “pass away”, we “go to a better place”, we “are at peace”. But very few of us seem to die!
As Christians we need to be more like Harry Potter. He knows he has survived Voldemort’s worst. So he quite happily talks about him by name.
We know the one who has conquered death. Jesus. So we need not fear saying the word. Death. It’s not the end. It’s a defeated enemy.