The apostle Paul is surprisingly candid about death, and the subject pops up frequently in his letters, including this passage to the church at Corinth. He explains his positive attitude toward death by offering a series of contrasts in which the unseen, eternal, incorporeal and immortal aspects of our future existence far outweigh the seen, momentary, corporeal and mortal nature of our brief existence on earth.
Filmmaker Woody Allen famously said, “I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” No doubt we agree. Not only don’t we want “to be there,” as ardent adherents of a death-denying culture, we also don’t want to think about it. Sit still for a moment. Close your eyes and think ahead into your future to the moment when you draw your last breath. You’re here one moment; gone the next. And the world will have to go on without you. Doesn’t it give you the willies?
But, although we don’t want to die — unless possibly if we’ve suffering with chronic and severe pain — we also may not want to live indefinitely as wretched, shriveled old crones or ancient crotchety old coots who can scarcely walk, think, eat or take care of ourselves. We probably don’t want that.
Intellectually, we know that we have a date with destiny, and time is inexorably moving us closer to that moment. That said, although we tremble at the thought of dying, we might be okay with immortality. Isn’t it true that, deep inside, we’re fond of thinking that we will be remembered after we die — at least for a little while? Yet, the inconsolable — if not inconvenient — truth is that for most of us, the sands of time will blow across whatever traces we made while walking upon the earth, and in less than a century after our death, no one will be alive who remembers us at all.
This is dreary talk, to be sure, but it is suggestive of the text before us from St. Paul’s second letter to the Christians at Corinth. The apostle wrote about death more than you might think. His letters to his protégé Timothy are particularly poignant, because Paul knew he was living on borrowed time. He tells Timothy, “I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith.”2
This dovetails with what we might say is the theme of today’s reading: “So we do not lose heart.” Read the apostle Paul — he’s positively ebullient on the subject of death, and indeed, he was fearless when he faced the Grim Reaper mano-a-mano. It is as though he had what the poet Wordsworth called “intimations of immortality.” If we have a shot at immortality, we’d be fools not to take it. Paul gets us thinking about the possibilities.
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