Death is unnatural in the sense that it is not the design of the Creator. It’s not supposed to happen to you. When God created Adam and Eve in the Garden, it was not His purpose for them to die. Death is not just a part of the “circle of life” as in that horrible Disney song. Holy Scripture describes death as the curse for sin (Romans 5).

As a thing unnatural, death is not something I am willing to make peace with. There will be no coming to terms. No armistice. Contrary to the well-intentioned but ethically challenged right-to-die crowd, death is not a friend to be welcomed as the deliverer from this world’s troubles. Death is the enemy whom Christ has destroyed! 1 Corinthians 15:26.

Our time, once coined the Culture of Death, wants to redefine death, to domesticate it. The Culture of Death believes that death is nature’s way of making room for life. The Culture of Death believes that a person’s value is determined by his productivity so that when a person becomes a burden or a drain, then he should die. It’s a “survival of the fittest” thing.

Of course, one must accept the reality that biological death is inevitable for all of us (except those alive at the parousia). And there are times when a dying person must be allowed to die – though not because it is his/her “right” but because it has become the lesser evil.

At the same time, I confess that by His own dying and rising, our Lord Jesus has transformed death so that for those who are baptized into Christ, death has lost its sting. We are set free from the fear of death and, as the Apostle writes, we do not grieve as the world does. For the new creature in Christ, death is no more a threat than a night of sleep.

Christians may inadvertently contribute to this domestication of death when we emphasize that so-and-so has gone to a better place. That’s true. And it is comforting. Jesus told the penitent thief, “Today you shall be with me in Paradise.” And St. Paul does write that to be absent from the body is to be with the Lord. But the focus must not be upon the soul residing in heaven.

Our final hope, after all, is not that one day this ol’ body will give out and we will be liberated from the prison house of the flesh to soar with God. Our final hope is to share in Christ’s bodily resurrection, having already been made a participant in it through Holy Baptism. And thus will be overturned the curse of sin and the reign of death forever.