Throughout the pages of the Bible, whether law or history or poetry or prophecy or gospel or letter, death is a fixation far more common than in our lives today. For biblical authors an awareness of death and its implications for life is crucial for a life of wisdom.

An Unpleasant Topic

When is the last time you thought of the fact that you will die? When did you last have a conversation with someone on the subject of death? Have you ever seen anyone die? Ever had someone die in your home? When did you last walk through a cemetery or attend a funeral? Have you read any book, watched any movie, even listened to any sermon that deals with the problem of death? I’m not talking about death by violence or death by accident or death by rare and virulent disease. I’m talking about death as a basic human experience—as basic as birth, eating, and sleeping.

Death is a fundamental human experience, uniting all humans across time and space, race and class. But in our time and place, death isn’t something we think about very often, if at all. The remarkable achievements of modern medicine have pushed death further and further back in the average Western person’s life span. We enjoy better disease prevention, better pharmaceutical treatments, and better emergency care than any other society in history. That’s a wonderful blessing, no question. But it comes with a major side effect: many of us can afford to live most of our lives as if death isn’t our problem.

Death is no less inevitable than it’s ever been, but many of us don’t have to see it or even think about it as a daily presence in our lives. When people die, it is more likely than not in a medical facility, cordoned off from where we live, a sanitized, carefully managed, even industrial process that occurs when professionals decide to stop giving care.

Death is still inevitable, but it has become bizarre. Death has also become a taboo of sorts, not to be discussed in polite company. We label such talk as “morbid.” It’s a pejorative term applied to words or ideas that are unusually dark—distortions of the truth as we wish to see it. To bring up the subject of death is too often awkward at best, shameful at worst.

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