“I will tell you something that has been secret: that we are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed.”1
I was only going to be in Washington, DC, for one day, and that day was full. Still, I had to see it. I had read about it, heard about it, seen news reports and pictures of it, but I had to see it for myself.
“You’ll only have about ten minutes,” my host explained.
“Ten minutes is all I need,” I told him.
So he pulled the car over and let me out.
A gray sky was shedding a coat of drizzle. I pulled my overcoat tighter around my neck. The barren trees and dead grass cast an appropriate backdrop for my mission. I walked a few hundred yards, descended a sloping sidewalk, and there it was. The Washington Monument to my left, the Lincoln Memorial to my back, and before me stretched the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
The wailing wall of a generation. Black marble tablets carved with names that read like the roster of a high school football team more than a list of dead soldiers—Walter Faith, Richard Sala, Michael Andrews, Roy Burris, Emmet Stanton.
Each name a young life. Behind each name was a bereaved widow . . . an anguished mother . . . a fatherless child.
I looked down at my feet. There lay a dozen roses, soggy and frosty from the weather. It was the day after Valentine’s Day. A girlfriend or wife had come to say, “I still remember. I haven’t forgotten.”
Next to me stood a trio. By the emotion on their faces, it was obvious they hadn’t come out of curiosity. They had come out of grief. The one in the center caught my attention. He wore a green army coat. He was big. He was black. He was bearded. Angry tears steamed down his face. Twenty years of emotion still trying to find an exit.
A couple walked behind me. They were looking for a name. In their hands was a program that told them on what tablet to look. “Did you find it?” I heard the woman ask. “Every name has a number.”
True, I thought. Every name does have a number and sooner or later every number is called.
It was then that I stopped looking at the names and stared at the monument. I relaxed my focus from the lettering and looked at the tablet. What I saw was sobering. I saw myself. I saw my own reflection. My face looked at me from the shiny marble. It reminded me that I, too, have been dying as long as I have been living. I, too, will someday have my name carved in a granite stone. Someday I, too, will face death.
Death. The bully on the block of life. He catches you in the alley. He taunts you in the playground. He badgers you on the way home: “You, too, will die someday.”
You see him as he escorts the procession of hearse-led cars. He’s in the waiting room as you walk out of the double doors of the intensive care unit. He’s near as you stare at the pictures of the bloated bellies of the starving in Zimbabwe. And he’ll be watching your expression as you slow your car past the crunched metal and the blanketed bodies on the highway.
“Your time is coming,” he jabs.
Oh, we try to prove him wrong. We jog. We diet. We pump iron. We play golf. We try to escape it, knowing all along that we will only, at best, postpone it.
“Everyone has a number,” he reminds.
And every number will be called.
He’ll make your stomach tighten. He’ll leave you wide eyed and flat footed. He’ll fence you in with fear. He’ll steal the joy of your youth and the peace of your final years. And if he achieves what he sets out to do, he’ll make you so afraid of dying that you never learn to live.
That is why you should never face him alone. The bully is too big for you to fight by yourself. That’s why you need a big brother.
Read these words and take heart. “Since the children have flesh and blood (that’s you and me), he too shared in their humanity (that’s Jesus, our big brother) so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants (that’s us).”2
Jesus unmasked death and exposed him for who he really is—a ninety-eight-pound weakling dressed up in a Charles Atlas suit. Jesus had no patience for this impostor. He couldn’t sit still while death pulled the veil over life.
In fact, if you ever want to know how to conduct yourself at a funeral, don’t look to Jesus for an example. He interrupted each one he ever attended.
A lifeguard can’t sit still while someone is drowning. A teacher can’t resist helping when a student is confused. And Jesus couldn’t watch a funeral and do nothing.
In this last section we are going to watch Jesus when he comes face to face with death. We are going to see his eyes mist as he sees his brothers and sisters bruised and beaten by the bully of death. We are going to see his fists clench as he encounters his enemy. We are going to . . . well, turn the page and you’ll see for yourself.
You’ll see why the Christian can face the bully nose to nose and claim the promise that echoed in the empty tomb, “My death is not final.”