Death Be Not Proud

“When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:  ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’  ‘O death, where is your victory?  O death, where is thy sting?’” -1 Corinthians 15:53. (ESV)

Recently several dear friends and relatives have come to the end of their lives.  Some I knew and loved over a period of years.  Others I did not know as well but knew their relatives and thus was grieved at their passing.  I think quite often of the English poet John Donne’s quotation, “Death be not proud,” when I hear of persons I love having passed.  Just within the last two weeks death came to a young lady and her husband in a plane accident; they were daughter and son-in-law of a friend of mine.  My husband’s niece died after a long sickness.  Her death reminded me again of my own husband’s death three years ago, and of what enjoyable times his niece, her husband, Grover and I had together.  Valentine’s Day came, and I always remember the death, years ago, of my own mother on that date.  I got word of a poet friend’s death, and his wife sent me copies of two beautiful poems he had penned, “Watch for Me” and “Last Request.”  Even in their beauty, Charles’s poems brought tears to my eyes.  A dear friend whom my husband and I had known and loved since we met in 1960 passed away on March 5. A cousin away out in Colorado passed away this February and left a legacy of his work and a strong, loving family.  The deaths of all of these touched me and I was filled with sympathy and feeling for their families as well as a sense of loss that, as the poet John Donne wrote:  “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls’ It tolls for thee.”  But for those of us who know the Lord Christ, He walks with us “through the valley of the shadow of death,” and takes some of the sting and sorrow out of dealing with death.  “O death, where is thy victory?” Paul asked.

Paul in writing about death in 1 Corinthians wanted Christians to have a positive view of death and consider it a means of transition from this mortal life to immortality.  In his treatise on earthly bodies and resurrection bodies in 1 Corinthians 15, he emphasizes the difference in the two.  The first condition describes the earthly body, the second the resurrection body:  perishable/imperishable; exists in dishonor/raised in glory; exists in weakness/raised in power; natural/spiritual; first Adam, of the earth, earthly/last Adam, a living spirit, heavenly; image of dust/image of glorified; mortal/immortal.  We as Christians need not fear death:  “Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!” (1 Corinthians 15:56).  I share this poem with you, some thoughts I wrote on death:

Death Be Not Proud

“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.”  -John Donne (1571?-1631)

Be not proud, O Death.  Laud not the power

You hold to end this life, to smother breath,

To bring this earthly span its ending hour,

To boast that over all hovers dark Death.

Your call to mankind brings a way of walking

Through shadows of a valley dark and drear;

But I know a Friend whose gentle talking

Lends my journey courage, assuages fear.

Not unlike birth that brings from Mother’s womb

The newborn babe to face this life on earth,

Your summons to endure the fearsome tomb

Is but brief passage to resurrected birth.

“Grave, where thy victory?  Death, where thy sting?*

Be not proud, Death!  I’ll rise to shout and sing!

                        -Ethelene Dyer Jones

                        (Poem composed November 20, 1999)

-Devotional by Ethelene Dyer Jones for 03.09.2014.

*(reference from 1 Corinthians 15:55)