Photo Credit: Ted Nasmith, The Temple of Melkor, image from Tolkien Collector's Guide
We seek what we can’t have. That’s always been our way, hasn’t it? Whatever is denied to us is dearest to us. So it went with Adam and Eve. And so it’s gone with us ever since mortality slithered into our world through a fissure of pride. Our history, and our world at this very moment, is saturated by a fear of death. We are the ones, says the writer of Hebrews, who “through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Heb. 2:15). At the epicenter of every human heart is the desperate plea for immortality. We are utterly certain that avoiding death would solve everything.
Whatever is denied to us is dearest to us.
In Tolkien’s mythical history of Middle Earth, The Silmarillion, an ancient race battles the same fear: the Númenóreans. The people of Númenor “were troubled by the thought of death” (274). Tolkien says,
The fear of death grew ever darker upon them, and they delayed it by all means that they could; and they began to build great houses for their dead, while their wise men laboured unceasingly to discover if they might the secret of recalling life, or at the least of the prolonging of Men’s days. Yet they achieved only the art of preserving incorrupt the dead flesh of Men, and they filled all the land with silent tombs in which the thought of death was enshrined in the darkness (The Akallabȇth, 274–275)
They never discovered the secret to recalling life or prolonging it. In fact, under the sway of the dark lord Sauron, they even risked building a temple to Melkor (Tolkien’s ultimate Satan figure) and sacrificing people in hopes “that he should release them from Death” (281). That’s the Ted Nasmith painting above—The Temple of Melkor. The Númenóreans had the gall to call Melkor “the Giver of Freedom.” But all they got in exchange was deeper enslavement. They worshiped the lord of rebellion in order to find life unending. In return, they received thraldom. Dark times. And they didn’t end well. Númenor was swallowed by the sea.
Are we so distant from this in the twenty-first century? The modern medical system provides us with countless blessings, but we strive to “delay death by all means” and hold as sacred the art of “prolonging Men’s days.” Of course, life is a good and precious gift from the Spirit of God. And we should do all God has enabled us to do to preserve and sustain it. But that truth can easily bleed into a denial of death and a constant hidden hope for “another way.”
Dealing with Death
I’ve been thinking of this lately after a series of losses by close friends and family. The grief is raw. I confess—with every other human in history, and with the Númenóreans—that I want there to be another way. I wanted this at seven years old, when I first realized death was real and became a Christian. I wanted it at eighteen, when I watched my father die of cancer in our living room. I want it now as we mourn the loss of the golden old, the striving middle-aged, and the still-blooming young. It still aches to know and feel that there are precious persons whose presence with God means absence with us.
I want death out. It doesn’t belong here, not in a world spoken and sustained by the God of life, not where we worship the Lord of the living. And yet I firmly believe that this God of life is perfectly sovereign over all things—even death. He is all-loving and all-wise and all-powerful. And that means death, no matter how large it looms, can only be a pawn in his play—a horrid thing used for holy ends, however mysterious those ends are to us.
If that’s true, then we can’t afford to be Númenóreans. We can’t spend all our time and energy trying to avoid the topic of death, denying our mortality, secretly hoping for another way. In fact, as long as we do this, the power and relevance of Jesus Christ and his work remain covered with haze, a misty offering from another world. Is it real? Can we touch it? Matthew McCullough put it well:
Before you long for a life that is imperishable, you must accept that you are perishing along with everyone you care about. You must recognize that anything you might accomplish or acquire in this world is already fading away. Only then will you crave the unfading glory of what Jesus has accomplished and acquired for you. And you need to recognize you are going to lose everything you love in this world before you will hope in an inheritance kept in heaven for you. . . . As long as we’re consumed by the quest for more out of this life, Jesus’s promises will always seem otherworldly to us. He doesn’t offer more of what death will only steal from us in the end. He offers us righteousness, adoption, God-honoring purpose, eternal life—things that taste sweet to us only when death is a regular companion. (Remember Death, 24-25)
If the Númenóreans were offered Christ, they wouldn’t have wanted him. That’s because they wanted something else more. They wanted to find a way around death, despite the impossibility. They wanted an imperishable life without first having to put off the perishable (1 Cor. 15:53-55). For people bent on dodging death, the message of Jesus seems irrelevant. But it only seems irrelevant because we’ve convinced ourselves that something fading is more trustworthy, more enjoyable, and less intimidating.
We were made for eternal story.
The truth we’re terrified to approach with the hands of faith is this: we were made for more than a perishable earthly life. We were made for eternal story.
Something More
There is something more for us than living forever in the world as it is. There is something more than this moment. There is something more than the next—the next meal, the next iPhone, the next pair of shoes, the next vacation. Living as a Christian, I am learning, is about staring through and beyond the next. What’s worth our gaze is an ancient word becoming ever stranger to us: glory. “The sufferings of this present time,” Paul says, “are not worth comparing with the glorythat is to be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18). Glory. Pervading light. Unending burning and beauty with the One who knows us best and loves us deepest. I turn more and more these days to poetry, which stretches out its hands for that glory. And that glory is buried deep beneath the things around us—all of our nexts. So wrote George MacDonald (Diary of an Old Soul, March §5),
We make, but thou art the creating core.
Whatever thing I dream, invent, or feel,
Thou art the heart of it, the atmosphere.
Thou art inside all love man ever bore.
Inside all things we’ve ever loved, beneath all our nexts, God burns like a star. We cover him over with darkness and mist of lesser longings. But still he burns. He’s always burning. As MacDonald would also write,
Our old age is the scorching of the bush
By life’s indwelling, incorruptible blaze.
O Life, burn at this feeble shell of me,
Till I the sore singed garment off shall push,
Flap out my Psyche wings, and to thee rush.
Psyche is the older word for “soul.” The image is of a caterpillar’s cacoon burning away as its wings unfold, letting it fall and flap toward God. We are the caterpillars. We are destined to fly toward the unending God. But death is our doorway.
Death Is a Door
Christ defeated death (1 Cor. 15:54-57). He told his followers flat out: “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25-26). In Christ, death is out. It’s done. It’s finished.
But Christ also made himself a door (John 10:9); he made himself the door through death and into life. He is the threshold to glory. We walk in Christ and through death to life eternal. In him, we get what the Númenóreans sought for apart from the gospel, apart from God. And in such seeking, there is no hope.
Christ is the door to something unendingly more.
Christ is the door to something unendingly more. There is not another way around death. But there is God’s Way through death (John 14:6).
It is good news that we are not Númenóreans. We seek no way around death. We seek the Door—the person through whom we find that ancient thing our soul’s butterfly wings flap after: glory. And glory is what it is only because it is the presence of unending Persons—Father, Son, and Spirit—along with all those who also have believed and walked through the Door.
May today be a means of entering.
