What a culture gives up when it loses the nerve to say the word
Have you noticed that nobody dies anymore?
They pass. They pass away. They depart, they transition, they are lost — as though a grown man were a set of car keys. They lose a battle, which quietly implies that somewhere there is a man who fought harder and won. They go to a better place, said often by people who are not at all certain there is one. And then we gather at a Celebration of Life, where the lighting is warm, the playlist is upbeat, there is a slideshow set to a song he liked, somebody says he would not have wanted us to be sad, and the single fact that brought every person into the building is the one thing nobody is allowed to name.
I am not here to mock the words. Most of them are reached for in love, by people whose throats have closed. Euphemism is frequently tenderness with nowhere else to go, and I have used every phrase on that list standing next to a casket. But language is not neutral furniture. When a culture loses a word, it has usually lost the thing the word was carrying. We have not grown gentler about death. We have grown unable to look at it. And a people who cannot look at death cannot be handed the one piece of news that would actually do them good.
The Trade We Made
For most of human history, death was domestic. People died in the front room. The body was washed by relatives. Children attended. You knew what a dead person looked like because you had seen several, and you had helped carry one.
We moved all of it out of the house. Dying happens in institutions now, attended by professionals, and the body goes somewhere else to be prepared by someone you will never meet. That is not a scandal; much of it is genuine mercy, and I would not trade modern medicine for a nineteenth-century front room. But the side effect is enormous. The average person today may reach forty having never once been in a room with a dead body, and never having watched anybody die.
So the most certain fact about your life has become the one experience you have no practice with. And into that inexperience walks an entire industry happy to sell you softer vocabulary for a thing you have decided not to think about.
Scripture Does Not Flinch
Open the Bible and the contrast is almost jarring. The Scriptures are relentlessly, unsentimentally direct about death. They do not whisper it. Genesis 5 is a genealogy that functions as a drumbeat — and he died, and he died, and he died. The patriarchs are buried in a named field purchased with a stated amount of money. David looks at a dead infant and says the sentence plainly. Jesus, told that Lazarus is sleeping, corrects the euphemism to the disciples’ faces: “Lazarus is dead” (John 11:14, KJV).
And then there is Solomon, who writes the single most counter-cultural line in the literature of grief:
It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. (Ecclesiastes 7:2, KJV)
Better. Not easier — better. And notice the reason he gives. The house of mourning is better because of what it does to the living: “the living will lay it to his heart.” To lay something to your heart is to let it settle in and change how you live. The funeral is doing work on you that the party cannot do.
Which means a Celebration of Life, when it is built to make sure nobody lays anything to his heart, has quietly converted the house of mourning into the house of feasting and billed it as healing.
What Mourning Was Doing For Us
Here is the cost of the trade, and it is heavier than a word.
- Death is the one teacher who cannot be argued with. Every other reminder that you are not in control can be explained away. A casket cannot. Solomon sends us to the funeral precisely because it is the one room where self-deception has nothing to work with.
- Numbering your days requires looking at the end of them. “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Psalm 90:12, KJV). You cannot number what you refuse to count toward.
- Grief that is not named does not leave. It submerges. A man told at the service that his father would not want him to be sad has been handed a rule against the only honest thing in him. He does not stop grieving. He grieves alone, badly, for years, usually in ways he cannot connect to the loss.
- And a death that was never real cannot be defeated. This is the big one.
The Reason the Church Must Say the Word
Christianity is not a philosophy for coping with mortality. It is the announcement of a specific event in which death was met head-on and broken. And every part of that announcement depends on death being named as the enemy it is.
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. (1 Corinthians 15:26, KJV)
Enemy. Not a transition. Not a natural part of the circle of life. Not a doorway. An enemy — an intruder in a world God made good, the wage of sin (Romans 6:23), the thing the Son of God came into human flesh in order to destroy:
Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. (Hebrews 2:14–15, KJV)
Read that last clause again, because it is a description of the culture outside your window: men and women who, through fear of death, are all their lifetime subject to bondage. The euphemisms are not strength. They are the sound of the bondage. You do not need soft words for an enemy who has been beaten; you need soft words for an enemy you are still afraid of.
And when Paul finally turns and addresses death directly, he does not comfort it, he does not spiritualize it, and he certainly does not celebrate it. He taunts it:
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? (1 Corinthians 15:55, KJV)
That line is only available to people who said the word first. You cannot mock an enemy you have been pretending is a friend.
The Confrontation
So here is the question, and it is for believers, not for the culture.
Why does the Christian funeral so often sound exactly like the secular one? Same soft vocabulary, same insistence that we not be sad, same slideshow, same careful avoidance — with a Scripture verse laid on top like a garnish. We have the only account of the world in which death is both fully real and fully defeated, and we are reaching for the same anesthetic as everybody else.
I think it is because we have confused two things that are not the same: grief and despair. Paul draws the line himself. He does not tell the Thessalonians not to sorrow. He tells them not to sorrow like the people who have no hope: “that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13, KJV). Not do not sorrow. Not as others. Christian grief is loud and real and it has a floor under it.
Jesus wept at a tomb He was about to open. Think about that for a minute. He knew Lazarus would be walking out in four minutes, and He still wept — because death is genuinely horrible and resurrection does not make it less horrible, only less final. If the One who held the remedy in His hand still cried, then your tears at your mother’s graveside are not a failure of faith. They are agreement with God about what death is.
What to Do Instead
This is not a call to be grim. Grimness is just despair with better posture. It is a call to be honest in public, which is a harder thing.
- Say it. “He died.” At the funeral, in the card, to the children. The word is a kindness; it tells the grieving that the thing they are feeling matches the thing that happened.
- Go to the house of mourning. Go to the visitation you could skip. Take your kids. Let them see what it is, and let them see believers who are weeping and not terrified.
- Do not comfort people with vagueness. “She is in a better place” is a sentence with no content unless you name the Person who makes it better. The Christian hope is not relocation; it is resurrection — a body raised, a name called, a Lord returning.
- Number your own days. Write the will. Make the call you have been postponing. Settle the thing with your brother while both of you are above ground. The funeral is supposed to be doing this work on you.
Where This Lands
Our grandparents kept skulls on their desks and the phrase memento mori on their walls — remember you will die — not because they were morbid, but because they were not able to forget it and decided to let it make them wise. We have achieved the forgetting. It has not made us braver. It has made us a people with no vocabulary for the one appointment none of us will miss.
And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many. (Hebrews 9:27–28, KJV)
Two appointments in one sentence: yours, and His. Yours is certain. His has already been kept. The gospel is not that death is not real. It is that death is real, it is an enemy, it earned its right to frighten you, and a Man walked into it on purpose, came out on the third day with a body you could touch, and now holds the keys.
A culture that cannot say died has no use for a word like risen. The two words only work as a pair.
So say the first one. Then say the second one louder.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist