The Wrongness of Human Death

Decay and death seem built into the structure of physical creation. Even if there could be a world in which only plants and fruit were eaten—the world suggested by God’s arrangements at the end of Genesis 1—still, plants and fruit would be eaten. People walk and make paths. Animals carry seeds and pollen from one place to another, and contribute to the erosion of soil. Paths make indentations that can become not only paths for animals but also for trickles of water, then streams, and on it goes. Leaves fall and turn to mulch. Plants with edible roots are uprooted; the plants will die as the rabbit enjoys his carrot. One could go on at length. Physical reality is ever-changing reality, and at its heart is the decay and death of plant life.

And perhaps more than plants: Physical creation, or at least the physical creation we know, also entails the death of animals. From insects to vertebrates, those with wings, those with fins, those tied to the ground: all are mortal, all die at some point or other. You needn’t look at human beings to find sadness at death: Many of the higher animals exhibit it. You can see it in the behavior of a dog whose companion is no longer around, and so forth. This too seems built into physical creation, this death, this separation, and with it the animal experience of sadness.

Animal feelings are manifest in behavior. Yet there is something additionally wrong in a human death, a depth in our sadness that is qualitatively different from the sadness of our pets and livestock. We often express this additional level of wrongness in anger, and indeed it is right to respond to human death with anger. But with whom are we angry? It might be a doctor who bumbled a surgery. It might be a corporation that produced a faulty product, an engineer who cut a corner, a spouse who didn’t take care of herself, or any of a hundred other people or institutions. Ultimately, however, our anger is with God, and it is right for us to be angry with him.

What is it about human death that arouses anger? As Herbert McCabe put it in an Advent sermon (televised on BBC in 1986, reprinted posthumously in God, Christ, and Us), when an animal dies, nature takes back what she had given. We are born with a given genetic structure into a world with its given physical laws and the environment and other inhabitants that are around us. With animals, that’s all there is to say: The combination of nature with life events is the story of that animal. But with humans it’s different. There is more to us than our genes and what has happened to us; there is also what we have made of it. We have freedom to shape our lives ourselves—not the absolute and ridiculous freedom of trying to be anything at all, but within what is given, we still have freedom to make ourselves out of it. If you will pardon the self-reference, nature did not give me a strong body, but she did gift me with an intellect. I could have chosen to do more to strengthen the body that I have. I felt an obligation, on the other hand, to nurture my mind and study. 

Every one of us has some measure of freedom to make ourselves. Even prisoners have freedom, as Solzhenitsyn discovered. One way to put this is to say our lives have a narrative. And here is the point: In every human death, a narrative has been cut short. McCabe underlines the point by saying that in human death, nature takes away more than she gave, because there is more to a human being than just genetic structure and environmental influence. 

And this is a cheat. We feel this cheat especially in the death of children. Funerals for children can be packed affairs, and parents, in their grief, often don’t want the funeral to be sad. With damp eyes I once said, in such a situation, that there was not one person present who wouldn’t have changed place with the child who had died. If we could crawl into the coffin and the boy could come out, we would. That’s how we feel the cheat of the death of a child.

This, however, is true of every human death. Even a centenarian who had long lost many bodily functions still had a life that was in important ways unfinished. She had outlived her ability to hear; she sometimes didn’t know whom she was talking with; but in her life there were many narrative threads that had not been completed. Age and decay had, instead, just cut them off. Her story had an end but was still incomplete.

And this is wrong. And the person to blame for this is God. And so we do, in words of Scripture, in psalms of lament, in Rachel weeping, in Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus. Even Jesus on the cross cries out to God. Death is wrong.

Once you feel this wrongness, you are ready for a theological surprise. It is God who causes you to be angry. God is the creator who upholds everything in existence and that includes our anger at him. We are, of course, not angry with God but with an image of God; God himself we cannot see in this life. But why is God causing us to feel this anger? In order, says McCabe, to make us long for resurrection.

What this means is that when we repeat psalm-shaped words that express anger with God over death, God is causing us to desire something that overturns death. God is opening us up to a longing for resurrection. Of course, we cannot know what resurrection life is, except to say that it just is the life of God. We can say, nonetheless, that for us to enjoy the life of God, our bodies will have to be raised from death, as Jesus’s body was. Our anger at death will be satisfied by nothing less than bodily resurrection. We want the boy to rise out of his coffin. We want ourselves to rise from wherever our body lies. We want our human stories to be narratives that find the only end that will satisfy, and that end is the being of God himself.