The news that the basketball great Kobe Bryant, his 13 year-old daughter, and seven others died Sunday in a helicopter crash is a shocking reminder of what should not be shocking: Momento Mori, Latin for, “remember that you must die.” I wrote of this just last week about the death in 1956 of a young missionary, Jim Elliot, and four companions who died trying to bring the gospel to Indians in the jungles of Ecuador. One of the things I appreciate about death, even as I hate and despise it, is that it relativizes all human achievement. What does all human striving and achievement mean if in the end we are just worm food? If that is all we are, if there is no life after death, it means absolutely nothing. A mist we are, and poof! We’re gone, forever.
When death strikes like this, startles us in its implacable finality, my reflections always take me to two passages of Scripture that address death directly. The first is John 11 when Jesus is standing in front of the tomb of Lazarus, his friend now dead four days. When he is brought to the tomb we read the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus Wept.” This might appear strange to the casual Bible reader, but think about it. Why would Jesus cry knowing in just minutes he would bring his friend back to life? If it was a made-up story he wouldn’t! A made-up Savior with God-like power doesn’t weep in the front of a tomb of the someone in he will in minutes bring back to life. No, the actual Jesus wept in a kind of anger and rage at the very fact of death’s existence. This should not be! Jesus may have been thinking, My creation has been marred by its antithesis, life has turned into death, and it is ugly! I hate it!
I see everything in apologetics terms, and death is no different. Unlike the Disney Lion King “circle of life” view of death, there is nothing “natural” about death, as if it were just part of the landscape like the sun and the sky and the clouds, just there, deal with it. move on. I can promise you that there was not a single person on Sunday when they learned about Kobe’s death (sadly strange to write those words) that felt is was “natural.” No, there was unbelief, shock, sadness, rage, emotions that I imagine Jesus felt, only infinitely more so because he is God! We feel this way about death because death is . . . . wrong. Terribly, horribly, utterly wrong! That’s why Jesus came to defeat it, as Isaiah predicted 700 years before he accomplished the task:
7 On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
8 he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken.
This mountain was the mountain upon which he took spiritual and physical death in our place, and rose from the dead three days later to confirm it.
The other passage is in Luke 13, when Jesus tells about 18 people on whom a tower fell and killed them. He says they were not more guilty sinners than all the others on whom the tower didn’t fall, and presents this warning: “But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” The message, then and now, to those who have not died tragically in a horrible accident, to those alive, is repent! There is something more important than this life, Jesus is saying, and that is our eternal soul. It is so easy to get sucked into forgetting that we too must die, that this life will be over before we know it, and that we ought to be prepared for the next one. I think Kobe and his daughter were, and hope the others were as well. Sunday morning before he headed to the airport for his final helicopter trip, he attended the 7:00 a.m. mass at Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church in Newport Beach. He knew that life was more than fame and fortune and accomplishment, for he worshiped the God in Christ who died that he might have eternal life. I am reminded of the Psalmist’s amazing words (116) that, “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.”
RIP Kobe and Gianna. We’ll see you soon.
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