The church where I worship – Grace Anglican Church in Edgeworth, PA – has an icon we affectionately call Dead Jesus. When I first started attending the church, it was the only altar icon we had. In it, Jesus is wrapped in burial cloths so that only his face is visible, and Mary lovingly embraces her dead son. One of our parishioners noted that Dead Jesus and Mary remind him of Frodo and Sam in Shelob’s Lair. Yep. I cannot unsee the resemblance! (And now neither will you.)
Dead Jesus was up nearly year-round when I first attended Grace. The only time the icon was put away was for the seven weeks of the Easter season. It’s hard to celebrate the Resurrection when you’re looking at Dead Jesus.
Happily, in the past few years, the church has acquired other icons, like Resurrected Jesus and The Last Supper. Still, at Lent, Dead Jesus comes back out and is with us through Holy Week.
Who wants to see Dead Jesus? I didn’t when I started going to Grace. All the Protestant arguments against crucifixes surfaced. He’s not on the cross anymore. The tomb is empty. Jesus is alive, sitting at the right hand of the Father. All true.
In 2022, I wrote about glimpsing Jesus in my dying aunt Connie. In 2023, I again saw Jesus as I watched cancer snuff out the life of my best friend Necia.
Who wants to see Dead Jesus? Me, it seems.
I grew up in a church full of disaffected Catholics. Iconography was looked down upon. As a younger Christian, I made all the arguments against icons and crucifixes. Then I lived a little more life. I met more Christians from different traditions. I lived in Jerusalem, where our Eastern Orthodox siblings in Christ taught me that icons are windows into heaven, a glimpse at the great cloud of witnesses cheering us. So now, I may have some icons in my room: John the Beloved draped over Jesus’ shoulders, Mary Magdalene encountering the Risen Christ, Jesus seated on the throne surrounded by angels and elders calling the faithful up to himself.
But, a crucifix depicting Jesus bleeding and dying or laying dead in the tomb? Is that necessary? He’s resurrected. He’s not on that cross anymore.
Then my best-for-eternity friend Necia was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer. As I prayed for her one night, I scanned my room. In this moment, I needed to look on the one whom we have pierced. I needed to see Messiah broken for us. I needed to see the stripes that heal us. I needed to see that holy cross – not any cross but the violent cross on which my savior died. I needed to see that, yes, Messiah suffers with us. Yea, he dies with us.
So now when I see Mary embracing dead Jesus, I can’t help but think of Necia.
The night before Necia died, we all held vigil at her bedside. Her breathing had become labored. We were sure she would pass during the night. So we waited.
It was agony to listen to her fight for breath all night. I sat in a far corner of the hospice room as long as I could, praying. Her sister and her husband stayed by her side all night.
As I listened to the death rattle emanate from my best friend, I thought of John the Beloved standing beneath Jesus’ cross.
If Jesus had a best friend, it was John. John was in the inner circle with his brother James and Peter. At the Last Supper, we see that John is comfortable enough with Jesus to lay across his chest. Then we see John at the cross, where the other 11 were not.
John, too, listened to his best friend fight to breathe. The brutality of the cross is that it suffocates you as you hang naked on a public road. The weight of your own body hanging on your outstretched arms makes it hard to breathe. The excruciating nail in the feet makes it harder and harder to push up and relieve the pressure. John (and Mary) watched for hours as Jesus painfully tried to breathe… until he didn’t.
So it was with Necia’s loved ones that night. Necia’s strong beating heart demanded oxygen, and her lungs fought for air. The sound was grotesque.
I understood why some look to speed up death through assisted (and unassisted) suicide, euthanasia, murder. Like Adam and Eve, we seek to take control of our own lives as if we had made ourselves and given ourselves breath and started our own hearts pumping.
But we have not. We are but dust, as we were reminded on Ash Wednesday. Yes, we are molded in the image of God with his breath/spirit within us, but “it is God who has made us and not we ourselves.”
It is painful to watch a body die. TV & the movies deceive us, as if death were relatively quick. The only suffering we see is intentional torture in the latest spy thriller… always at the hand of some evil mastermind.
So when we see our loved ones suffering, we want a villian to blame. It must be God. God is so cruel. If God loves, why do we suffer? He must be a sadist! 1
Certainly not!
God is not a villain. He created all we see and he called it good (Gen. 1-2). His character is always to have mercy (Exod 34:6-7). He also dares to step into our pain.
How do we know? Christmas and Easter and all that transpires in between.
God, the all-powerful creator of the universe, became a human completely vulnerable to every physical and emotional wound we suffer. Jesus certainly experienced the death of his surrogate father Joseph. He was likely mocked as illegitimate2 for most of his life. His own brothers mock his call and ministry (John 7:2-5). He is betrayed by Judas, disavowed by Peter, and abandoned by nine other disciples. Of the 12 men, only John is faithful to the end.
Jesus’ body was torn to shreds by the Roman cat o’ nine tails. He was beaten and bruised by Roman and Jewish fists. Thorns and nails pierced his skin.
No, God cannot be a sadist. He doesn’t revel in our pain. Instead, he enters it. He made himself as vulnerable as a zygote in his mother’s womb and lived life as the son of a poor carpenter in a Middle Eastern province of the Roman Empire.
When death came for him in the form of a band of soldiers at Gethsemane, Jesus surrendered. He had already said, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (Matt 26:29). Jesus suffered the deep sorrow of knowing death was coming. Yet, once he surrendered to the Father’s will, he moved in peace and confidence.
So it was with Necia. She was angry that the cancer was caught so late, that a medical test several months before had given a false negative. Then she gave it to God.
“I am at peace,” she told me from her hospice bed. She truly was. She’d lived her whole life surrendered to God. This was no different.
Necia was a true representative of Christ to me for 14 years. She loved me unconditionally. Yes, she told me off and challenged me. Through it all, I never doubted her love for me.
Still, she never looked more like Jesus than in her dying: resolute, submitted, at peace, still praying for others. I never felt more like John the Beloved: present, committed, in love, perplexed, still confident that God is good and faithful, ready to do anything.
I pray that I can die well like Necia and that before then, I can keep the faith and do the little things I saw her do.
Footnotes
- Even the great C.S. Lewis, who ministered Christ to all of Britain in the midst of World War II, felt God must be a sadist during one of those painful stabs of grief after the death of his wife Joy. See C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, various editions.
- See Jesus’ argument with Pharisees about parentage in John 8:12-59, particularly v. 41: “…They said to him, ‘We were not born of sexual immorality…’”