Overcoming our Fear of Death

Our culture has an extreme fear of death.  This fear is not a fear of the actual event of death, but rather an understanding of what death is.  Death is perceived as the end of our existence and a separation from the persons and things that we are attached to.

In the Church we know better, or at least we should.  In the Christian tradition, the term "death" is really a misnomer because we know that we are eternal.  We literally do not cease to exist, but simply pass along from one form of existence to another.  And the great news is that the God of eternity has all power and authority on earth, and all power and authority in the next world.  Death does not separate us from those that we love or from God.  There is nothing that can ultimately separate us. 

Jesus reveals this in a discussion with the Sadducees.  The Sadducees did not think that people could be resurrected.  In support of this position, then turn to a text in the Hebrew Bible that says that if a man dies married but childless, the man's brother was required to marry the widow.  The Sadducees present Jesus with a hypothetical: what if there were seven brothers, the first brother marries a women and dies childless, and then the other six brothers, in turn, marry the women and die childless.  The Sadducees concluded that if there was an afterlife, this would mean that the women would have seven husbands, which violated the Hebrew Bible.  Consequently, this raised the inference that there was no afterlife.

Jesus responds to the Sadducees by referring back to the story of Moses and the burning bush.  God, in that encounter, revealed Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in the present tense: God was not the God who was the God of these three Patriarchs, but still is.  In God's eyes, all are alive because God is the God of the Living.

In God's eyes, all are alive, because we are all eternal.  Consequently, death is not something to be afraid of.  It is just a passage from another form of existence to another.