Dying as part of a community of hope

ARGUMENTS FOR EASTER The Right Rev Stephen Sykes, Bishop of Ely, conclu des our series of meditations for Holy Week with a consideration of the meanings that death may have for a Christian.

The tonal quality of the word "death" derives from our past. When I think about death, I remember the widow who wrote to me that she was dying, but whom I failed to visit before she was gone; I think of my own father-in-law, for whom the consolation in his final extreme enfeeblement was the thought that he would be reunited with his wife; I think of a friend who went through labour knowing that her baby had already died. These are the deaths which inform and colour my understanding of death, and they are in the past. They cluster my memory with a variety of powerful emotions, of regret, of sorrow, of guilt, and even of encouragement.

Holy Saturday prompts a willingness to think long and hard about the death of Jesus, and to change the way in which these past deaths affect me. The same, of course, might be true of the death of Socrates, or any other death to which I might give serious attention. But the sort of difference which it might make to think in this way about Jesus, rather than about anyone else, is a difference in understanding those connections between myself and others which death has brought about.

Death is a matter which touches me because of the impact which those past deaths have upon the web of interconnectedness which bound me to them. This web is made up of mutual relations. I both give to, and receive from, other people. My sense of the kind of person I am is bound into their lives, and their death inflicts irretrievable rupture, not just in our relationship, but upon my sense of my own continuity. Death, therefore, is what makes our search for person-constructing, identity-sustaining values so serious an enterprise. Since all our present relationships are going to suffer the damage that death can inflict, these values must be such as to understand the onslaught of the thought of death. If I show myself ready to allow the story of Jesus' death to influence the way in which I understand death, then in effect I am inviting him to have a hand in these relationships.

To see death as firmly set within the context of various forms of interconnectedness sets a question against that tradition which insists that we die alone. Of course it may be true that persons are physically or emotionally isolated when dying. It is also trivially true that people die one by one at particular times and places. But it seems a quite unnecessary case of giving death a bad name to insist that my death is something I must do on my own. We do not have to die in loneliness. The whole point of Christians saying that love is stronger than death is that one need not die alone in that sense.

Everything about dying should place us in the familiar context of those who have participated in the death of Christ. We are surrounded here, if anywhere, by a great cloud of witnesses. This explains the familiar petition in ancient liturgies that we be protected from "sudden death". To die suddenly, of course, meant to die without the benefit of the ministrations of a priest. But it also meant, in extremis, to die without even having been able to make a mental act of recollection, the point of which was precisely to locate oneself in the fellowship of those who have lived and died in the faith of Christ.

It is the measure of the distance we have travelled from such simple pieties that we should regard sudden collapse in the midst of daily life as the best of all possible deaths. To desire such a death for ourselves is a sign of the degree to which we have come to accept an unrealistic unforgetfulness of death.

The Christian need not die alone, but as a member of a community of hope. That statement does not entail any Promethean denial of the reality of death, or an inauthentic cheerfulness about the prospect of dying. But it makes a large difference to belong to a community of forgiveness, love and endeavour, which knows that nothing can separate it from the love of God. Death has lost the sting which chains us irredeemably to the past, in guilt or desperate attempts at forgetfulness.

When we celebrate the feast of that unconquered love tomorrow, we shall do so as a community. We shall remind ourselves of those moments of betrayal and rupture which preceded Jesus' death, and yet of how, within them, he gave up his life for the life of the world. And, because of this, we shall know that all those labours which build up our interconnectedness- in-love will not have been done in vain.