This Sunday the liturgy speaks to us about life and death.  The first reading from the Book of Wisdom reminds us of a critically important truth: God did not make death: death did not have a place in the Creator’s first plan.  It’s the result of sin: sin so radically affects the human race and in fact the whole world, that death has become our inheritance.  Even Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God himself, accepted death as a necessary part of the human experience that he wanted to share with us completely: he accepted death and experienced it, in order to destroy it.  

Our human hearts naturally shudder at the anguish of death and loss.  But where there is fear and uncertainty, we also search for the deepest and most significant meaning, and we find it: We have a deep instinct that death is not just a biological experience: that it has supernatural meaning.  And this is true, because Christ has transformed this experience for us.  Death is no longer a wall that we all eventually crash into: because of Christ, death is now a door, a sacred gate through which we pass into eternity.  Despite the very reasonable fear that we still have, which is okay, because it’s okay to fear the unknown, to fear what we have never experienced; despite that, death no longer needs to be the event that we fear above all else. 

In the Gospel, Christ encounters a man, Jairus, who has great need and great concern for his daughter, but he also has great faith.  So when Christ arrives at the girl’s bedside, he says, “Why is everybody so upset?  She’s not dead, but asleep.”  Those standing around ridiculed Christ for saying this, because they didn’t understand the actual power that Christ had over death.  You can see why they would say, “Come on, man…That is not what we need to hear right now.”  What they didn’t yet know, was that this man, this Incarnate Son of God, actually had authority over death.  He showed them, and he shows us that the death of the body is a painful transition, but it’s a transition, not an ending.  It’s a night’s sleep, from which we will wake up in the presence and the love of God. 

It’s a great mystery that God gives us the experience every single day of what’s sometimes been called “the little death”: the experience of falling asleep: every night, a process of growing weary and tired in body and in mind, of preparing ourselves and then surrendering, almost against our will, to the powerlessness of sleep which overcomes us, suddenly and rather mysteriously.  Every night we model and practice the moment that will come at the end of our lives: and every morning, we experience what will happen next: the rising again in the light of a new sun.  “At night there are tears, but joy comes with dawn,” we prayed in the Psalm.  God prepares us for the sacred gate of death over a lifetime, through this most basic cycle of our life: the cycle of night and day, sleep and wake.  We’re not disturbed by the helplessness of falling sleep because we’re fairly sure that we will wake up, that we will regain our faculties in just a little while on the other side of the night: and this actually, mysteriously, subtly trains our mind and our heart to be ready for the end of this life: to be ready to trust that we will wake up in the morning, wake up from the long sleep of death, to the perpetual day bathed in Easter Light. 

In this, and in so many other ways in the Christian Life, we prepare ourselves to have hope and courage in the face of the certainty of death.  And we come to know also that what we should truly fear, is not death, but sin.  Death is the separation of the body and the soul.  It’s a painful separation, and an unnatural one: the body and the soul are meant to be together: that’s why we believe in the Resurrection of the Body: they’ll be back together again in the fullness of time, as they should be.  The real source of danger for us is sin because, rather than being a separation of the soul from the body, sin is the dreadful separation of the soul from God: it’s the greatest tragedy.  This is why the saints choose to endure their sufferings rather than deny Christ: why the martyrs choose death rather than being forced to sin.  Serious sin is the worst thing imaginable: it’s far worse than death.  This could be uncomfortable, but it’s a fundamental, unavoidable part of the Christian perspective.  And it couldn’t be more counter-cultural.  For the world around us, death is the greatest evil, and discomfort and pain are the most serious things to be feared in the meantime.  But we know that sin is what can really harm us, what can really affect our eternity. 

But we hope.  We rejoice.  Because the victory has been won, and we must merely be faithful to Christ, our captain triumphant over the powers of sin and death.  God is our strength and our glory.  Love is our inheritance, and heaven is our true home.  May we have the peace and the hope of those who know that death will not have the last word.  That death has been swallowed up in the Victory of Christ’s Resurrection.