Woody Allen famously remarked that he was not afraid of dying, he’d just prefer not to be around when it happened. While it’s a funny one liner, I think it gives voice to an extremely common conception around death. Death is seen as the final ending of everything and, as humans, it’s something we all have to face. We don’t just apply it to our lives either, we talk of the death of decency or the death of civility meaning we consider those values to be no more. Sports commentators refer to the closing minutes of a game as “at the death” and once the final whistle has blown, the game is over for good. This recent pandemic has given us a lot of time to think about our own mortality and so the readings today come at an opportune time.
These readings focus our minds on two certainties of the Christian faith. In our gospel reading, the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids reminds us of the certainty of the return of Jesus. Jesus is going to return at some point although we do not know exactly when. What we do know is that He is going to return. The second reading from Thessalonians reminds us of the certainty of what will happen when Jesus returns; the dead will be resurrected and those still alive at that time will be “caught up” to meet Jesus. Thereafter, Jesus, the resurrected dead and those living at the time will be together in the Kingdom of God for eternity. Paul wants the Thessalonians to remember this as it means that death should not hold any fear for us. We should be living our lives in this knowledge, that death is not the end.
If we live in this way, we can give others hope. It’s not to say we won’t grieve and mourn when someone dies, but we will grieve in a different way. We feel the pain of loss but it’s more of a temporary separation, not a permanent one. We don’t have the sense of helplessness because we know death is not the end. At a funeral for children who were killed by a bomb in church, Martin Luther King said “death is not a full stop at the end of the sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates life to a more lofty significance. It is not a blind alley that leads humanity into a state of nothingness but an open door that leads to life eternal.” This is what we need to live by. In doing so, we show those who fear that death is the ultimate end that life is in fact the ultimate end. We are called to live lives that are an imitation of how Jesus lived, we cannot do this if we are living in constant fear of death.