“Grandpa, will you die?”

The quiet spoken question from the backseat of my car came from my then four-year-old grandson. I knew it was an important moment.

“Yes, I will. Everyone grows old and dies.” I added, “But then I will be with Jesus in heaven and I will pray for you all the time.”

Silence came as an answer. I knew he was pondering one of the deepest thoughts of his young life. We discussed timing. I reassured him that I did not expect to die any time soon (I’m getting older but I likely have somewhere between one and two decades left). But his sobriety that day continued to speak of an inner assessment of life itself.

Among the most brutal facts of our existence (as well as that of everything around us) is our mortality. Strangely, our culture has no place for death – it is not part of the modern narrative.

There is a phenomenon here in the South (my broader exposure to America is limited) of “celebration of life” services replacing traditional funerals. Happy songs with slides or videos of a life-just-finished are treated as though they were appropriate for grief. In point of fact, they are often grief-denying. One of the local mega-churches has instituted a rule that the body of the deceased is not to be brought into the church. It is quietly buried with a small grave-side service. The celebration of life dominates all. A friend recently posted an article noting that such celebrations ignore the reality of infant deaths.

I would insist that the modern attitude towards death (denial) is related to our culture of consumerism. The dead neither sow nor reap (nor shop).

Death is a boundary issue. To live without the recognition of death is to live a false existence, to deny our own contingency. Our life is not our own – it belongs to God. (Jer. 10: 23).

None of this is morbid. It is oddly “life giving.” Surrounded by beauty and the goodness of God, we ourselves are signs of that same beauty and goodness. We are able to say with God, “It is good.” In and through Christ, even our death has been sanctified, becoming the gate to eternal life rather than an entrance into the shadows of Hades.

All of this is strangely prefigured in Genesis’ creation story. The first six days of creation see the appearance of various things: the sun, the moon, the earth, the waters, the creatures, and human beings. But the work of God is not finished until the seventh day. On that day, it says, “And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.” (Gen. 2:2) It is this Sabbath (seventh) day that God “makes holy.”

“So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.”(Genesis 2:3)

Christ echoes these words as He speaks from the Cross, saying, “It is finished.” The work of the New Creation is completed as Christ enters the “Great and Holy Sabbath” (the Orthodox name for the Saturday of Holy Week). On that Sabbath, Christ “rests” in the tomb. Death itself is sanctified and becomes the weapon by which death-as-bondage is trampled down (“trampling down death by death”). It is Christ’s great and holy Pascha. In Orthodox reckoning, Sunday (as the day of resurrection) is the “eighth day,” the day in which the fulfillment and consequence of the Sabbath is fully revealed.

But the Sabbath is more than “resting from work.” In the scope of the Old Testament, the Sabbath represents a day, a year, and a complete cycle of years. The Sabbath year sees the release of captives and slaves, the cancellation of debts, and the land itself given a year of rest. In the Sabbath year beyond the Sabbath (the 50th year), there is the Jubilee year in which there is a restoration of property to original owners – something of a great “reset.” It is the model for what will be called the “Day of the Lord,” its cosmic version. Christ identified His own coming as the embodiment of that cosmic day (Luke 4:16-21).

It is the Sabbath, particularly in this extended understanding, that reveals its role in sanctifying all time. Christ quotes Isaiah in describing His fulfillment of the prophecy:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18–19)

When John the Baptist sent word to Christ, asking if He was truly the Messiah, Christ re-iterated the Isaiah passage:

“Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.” (Luke 7:22–23)

Christ is proclaiming the final Sabbath, the day that sanctifies all days. His commandments regarding debts, forgiveness, and the poor, particularly bring attention to how our lives should conform to this cosmic Jubilee.

In His parables, a rich man goes to Hades, having ignored Lazarus the poor man at his gate. He has created a wall between himself and salvation. No one can reach him. We hear the same theme in another parable of a rich man who was satisfied and pleased with his wealth.

“…and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” ’But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.” (Luke 12:17–21)

The rich man in this last parable was the prisoner of his work and wealth. He imagined himself “free” only when he had saved enough to cover his merry retirement. But death mocks his false freedom, demanding his soul that very night. There were no poor souls prepared to receive him.

“Grandpa, will you die?”

Perhaps the right answer is, “I already have.” To unite ourselves with Christ in His tomb, to enter into the glorious Sabbath of His rest, is to have united ourselves with the poor, the sick, the blind, the lame, and the prisoners. This is the life of the Kingdom of God. This is the death that tramples down death.

With Lazarus who once was poor…may we find rest everlasting.