Christ and Death at a funeral
Death must have attended funerals with a smile on his face. One more down and many more to go. Clients in a long line following the one that was now in Death’s trophy case. Sad or carefree, smiling or weeping, rich or poor, brilliant or ordinary, learned or ignorant—it made no difference, he’d drag them all down.
But some years earlier he had noticed a boy in a line that followed a coffin. There was something about this child he couldn’t quite put his finger on...what was it...hmm? He saw him numerous other times as the years passed and sometimes he looked in Death’s direction but it must have been only that—a general look in the right direction; he couldn’t have really been looking at him. Still, the vague and distant sense of unease stirred in the abyss that made up Death’s thoughts. Ach, what did it matter—this...something or other—that nibbled at the edge of his mind, the boy’s day would come like all the rest and Death would have him. Oh these humans all acted courageously when they were young and in their prime but now and then as they grew older they sensed Death’s presence and the thought of him began to vex them. Death knew this—had seen it time without number.
It wasn’t that this (now) young adult didn’t take Death seriously. He took it seriously all right, more seriously than all the other mourners; and yet, he had the look of someone that was biding his time. "Strange thing that," Death mused to himself.
Then there was this hullabaloo that began with the appearance of a wild one called John the Baptist. His movement spread like wildfire but before too long it cooled to a glow and the once excited revivalists said nothing when a peevish king threw the prophet in prison. But that’s when the youngster Death had first noticed, now a grown young man, began to preach and heal and...raise the dead. With a growing feeling of doom Death now realised why he had a vague unease at the sight of the boy. No wonder Death had sometimes thought that the boy had actually seen him as he had hovered on the fringes of the mourning. He hadn’t merely been looking in Death’s direction—he had been looking at him. As if he had been calmly saying, "Watch my lips, you and I are going to meet one of these days and I’ll bury you."
Oooh, I do love Sundays, when the bread and the wine are set before us and we commune with the living Jesus Christ, proclaiming his death "until he comes."
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.