Life and death as a spectrum
I remember when my friend got diagnosed with stage four cancer in college. It was awful. Treatment after treatment failed, and I felt so useless. I couldn’t save him, and no matter how much I prayed, it felt like God wouldn’t either. They eventually sent him to the NIH for experimental treatments. He was only 23 and had already lost his hair and eyebrows. He could barely walk, even with a cane. I hate to admit it, but it was really hard to visit him in the hospital. It wasn’t because of him; it was seeing him like that. It was just so painful to remember how healthy and good-looking he used to be, and now he was hunched over, coughing, and in agony.
His situation perfectly illustrates something I read in grad school: Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews by Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson. One thing that really stuck with me was their chapter on defining “Sheol” in the Bible.
To us, people are either alive or dead. If they speak – they are alive: end of story. They may be gravely ill, under lethal assault, or sentenced to capital punishment, but they are living nonetheless. The [writers of poetic scripture]1 thought in a markedly different way. They were quite capable of seeing just such a [suffering person] as dead. … In other words, for us, death is radically discontinuous with life, a quantum leap as it were, laying between the two. For the poets who wrote the psalms, by contrast, the major discontinuity lay between a healthy and successful life, on the one hand, and one marked by adversity, in physical health or otherwise, on the other.2
So for example Psalm 18 depicts someone who is being persecuted by his “enemies,” but he describes it in words that describe death:
The cords of death encompassed me; the torrents of perdition assailed me; the cords of Sheol entangled me; the snares of death confronted me.
…
He reached down from on high, he took me; he drew me out of mighty waters. He delivered me from my strong enemy, and from those who hated me; for they were too mighty for me. They confronted me in the day of my calamity; but the LORD was my support. He brought me out into a broad place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me.
Psalm 18:4–5, 16–19
Or in Psalm 30, the speaker was healed, and his healing is equated with being taken up from the Pit (death):
O LORD my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me. O LORD, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.
Psalm 30:2–3
Why did this idea stand out to me? It proposed a different way of looking at existence, God, and humanity. What encompasses death, at least poetically speaking, is much more than simply not breathing. It is being in a state that is not correct, either because of one’s own choices, or because of what others have done to someone. From this perspective, life and death are not quite binary, but sit on a spectrum. When you are sick, when you are oppressed, you are moving further and further along the “Death” side of the spectrum. When you have enough to eat, when you feast in joy, when you have full health, you are moving along the spectrum on the “Life” side.
My friend with cancer, he was “walking in death.” His sickness and the defeat of his body were death. Paradoxically, at the same time he was walking at the same time with the God of Life, who sustained his faithful son during his dark valley walk and welcomed him into His arms of life when he was released from suffering.
This is the weird paradoxical space that all God’s children currently reside. The full spectrum of the realm of death is all around us, but God has not left us without hope. The God of Life, the giver of life, the sustainer of life, the (re)creator of life gives us reminders of his Life everywhere.
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The authors wrote here “the ancient Israelites” - partially because this was the focus of their book. I feel ok saying “biblical authors” in place of “the ancient Israelites” because the authors use the words of the Bible as their primary evidence. I’m just taking it one step back. ↩︎
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Madigan, Kevin J. and Levenson, Jon D. Resurrection: The power of God for Christians and Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 46. ↩︎
