If you ever get a chance to read the little book Death and Life: An American Theology by Arthur C. McGill (Wipf & Stock Publishers), you should! It’s just about 100 pages, and every page is well worth the read; Halden Doerge turned me onto it a few years ago now, and I have read it a few times. McGill describes the American fixation with death, with its voracious attempt to exclude death from all of daily reality. He illustrates this by noting how we create enclaves wherein we hide death away from our day-to-day existence by creating nicely adorned hospitals, morgues, mental homes, cancer wards, etc. etc. Instead we idolize the “image” of what he calls the bronze people; you know, all the people with finely sculpted bodies on commercials, professional athletes, models, youth, etc. etc. He sketches this American approach to dealing with the reality of death (by not and yelling NO!) in the first half of his book, and then the second half he sketches and developes how a Christian in Christ should view death (he takes special looks at Romans 6 and the Gospel of John and Jesus). This book is such a good book, you need to get your hands on it! It’s relatively cheap and a quick but substantial read (just google Wipf & Stock Publishers, and search for the title and order directly from them). Anyway, I want to quote something McGill says in the beginning section of the second part of the book. Here he is still somewhat referring to how the typical American assumption about death applies to what they think of Jesus’ approach to death:

Jesus’ death . . . is not a fateful fatality like the image of the automobile accident. It does not serve to show how humans, in spite of all their passion for life, can be wiped out in a moment’s notice. By his death Jesus does not represent the enormity of the power of death. On the contrary, he chooses to die. He lays down his life freely and deliberately, and he does so in accord with God’s own will. Jesus’ death is just the opposite of an unexpected, unforeseen auto accident. For the New Testament there is absolutely nothing accidental at all about Jesus’ death. It belongs to his conscious purpose; it is grounded in God’s loving will. Far from proclaiming the mutilating power of death (as does a nuclear bomb), Jesus’ death takes death out of the demonic and makes it an event informed by the free decision of this man and by the graciousness of this God.

Precisely because they see death as the complete negation of life, many Americans remain Christian only by denying that Jesus wants to die and that he means to die. Similarly, they must deny that it is God’s will that they too should deliberately live toward death. From the viewpoint that now prevails in the United States, the way of Jesus is suicide, and no Christian advocates that people lay down their lives. On this view, the Christian way opposes death, fights death, helps all sick and deprived people, keeps away from death as long as possible—that is the will of God as worshiped by the bronze people. Many American Christians (and perhaps many American Ministers also) will not hear of the Jesus who deliberately lays down his life on God’s initiative and expects all his followers to do the same. (Arthur C. McGill, “Death and Life: An American Theology,” 46-7)

It may sound as if, in a way, that McGill is fighting the idea of medical intervention, and the like; he’s not! Instead, he’s sketching, once again, an “attitude” that is so consumed with self, that all it can do, as the center of its existence, is to fight death at all costs (or really, try to elide or ignore it by creating “outward” monuments of ourselves that seem to defy its actual reality—viz. death). McGill is setting the stage for how Christ’s life (and thus the Christian’s life) is just the inverse; how the Christian’s life is defined by ‘taking up our cross daily, and following Jesus’. How the Christian’s life is open to die, because in dying (in Christ), the Christian receives their life from God through the Spirit (McGill later calls this ‘ecstatic existence’).