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Remember Your Death at Easter
The year Liz was treated for cancer, she noticed something odd happening every Sunday morning. Walking into church, she’d feel a subtle disconnect—a gap between the enthusiastic, triumphant worship around her and the reality she was living. Friends would greet her with smiles. Uplifting songs would fill the sanctuary. And she’d stand there, freshly acquainted with her own mortality, wondering why the community most equipped to stare death in the face seemed to be working so hard not to.
We don’t say this as a criticism. The impulse toward joy and resurrection hope is right and good. But we’ve come to believe that we often reach for Easter Sunday while skipping past what Good Friday is asking us to confront. We’ve robbed ourselves of experiencing to the fullest the life we participate in through Christ’s resurrection.
We’re Remarkably Good at Avoiding Death
Psychologists have documented what most of us intuitively know: Human beings are highly motivated to push death out of conscious awareness. Terror management theory, developed by three psychologists over decades of empirical research, suggests that the knowledge of our inevitable death drives much of our behavior, usually without our realizing it.
When reminded of our mortality, we instinctively reach for whatever makes us feel less finite—clinging more rigidly to our worldviews (which connect us to something larger than ourselves) or pursuing status and significance (which give us a sense that our lives matter and will be remembered). These are unconscious attempts to outrun the awareness of death, and research shows they can drive us toward rigidity, defensiveness, and self-aggrandizement.
We often reach for Easter Sunday while skipping past what Good Friday is asking us to confront.
Christians aren’t immune to this. Several studies published in medical journals have reported that religiously committed people are more likely to pursue aggressive, life-prolonging medical interventions at the end of life, even when doing so offers little benefit.
A committed belief in life’s sanctity may well be part of the picture. But research documents that the reasons religious patients and families most commonly give for pursuing aggressive care include hope for a miracle, refusal to “give up on God,” and the belief that every moment of life must be preserved at any cost—motivations that sit closer to the fear of death than to a considered theology of human dignity.
It’s worth noting that these interventions—ventilators, resuscitation, ICU care—are precisely the ones most likely to diminish the quality and dignity of dying. Whatever is driving that statistic, it raises a sobering question: Have we absorbed our culture’s terror of death more than we’ve absorbed the New Testament’s hope in the face of it?
Our churches tend to absorb this cultural evasion of death rather than resist it. One telling sign: The traditional funeral—with its honest naming of death, its grief, its confession of mortality before God—is rapidly giving way to the “celebration of life,” a warmer and more comfortable gathering that can quietly sidestep the harder realities.
The impulse to honor a person’s life is good, but when celebration displaces lament entirely, something important is lost. When that assumption seeps into our congregations more broadly, we rush to the empty tomb without having truly reckoned with what was laid in it. The resurrection becomes a fact we affirm rather than a sobering and costly victory.
A Practice the Church Once Knew Well
There’s a Latin phrase—memento mori, meaning “remember that you must die”—that for most of Christian history wasn’t considered morbid but profoundly clarifying.
Have we absorbed our culture’s terror of death more than we’ve absorbed the New Testament’’s hope in the face of it?
The Rule of Saint Benedict instructed sixth-century monks to hold the expectation of death before their eyes daily (4.47). For centuries, churches were literally surrounded by graveyards. Believers walked past the graves of the dead every time they gathered to worship, a built-in reminder that the communion of saints spans both sides of death.
Medieval believers carved skulls on their tombstones, not as decorations of despair but as invitations to live wisely. The Puritans embraced the same discipline. Charles Spurgeon preached on death, often urging his congregation to vividly imagine their own deaths and reckon with their salvation.
More recently, theologian Todd Billings has written compellingly about why recovering memento mori matters: When we remember that we’re going to die, we remember that we’re not the main character of the story. God is. The world is larger than our current circumstances, and our horizon extends far beyond this life.
Karl Barth argues (in Church Dogmatics) that “Memento mori! is the very opposite of every morbid alienation from or convulsive denial of life. For what else can it mean but that man should watch and not sleep. . . . Memento mori! means concretely Memento Domini!” Barth’s point is that remembering our death is always meant to be about remembering our Lord.
This is the key insight. For the Christian, contemplating death isn’t an exercise in fatalism. It’s an act of theological orientation—a way of locating ourselves within the story Scripture tells. Moses prays, “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12). Solomon observes that the house of mourning offers something valuable that the house of feasting cannot (Eccl. 7:2). The practice of memento mori takes these instincts and gives them shape.
What Facing Death Does
After her year of cancer treatment, Liz noticed a change in herself that she hadn’t expected. There’s a particular sick feeling—you may know it—that settles in the pit of your stomach when something threatens your sense of security. A frightening diagnosis. A failing relationship. A phone call you don’t want to answer.
After receiving her diagnosis, that feeling quietly governed more of Liz’s behavior than she realized. She’d find ways to avoid reminders of suffering because the fear underneath was too uncomfortable.
When we remember that we’re going to die, we remember that we’re not the main character of the story. God is.
But after her treatment, that feeling largely disappeared. At first, she worried she had become numb. Then she understood what had happened: Having faced her mortality directly, she was no longer organizing her life around avoiding it. Paradoxically, she became more responsive to people in pain, not less—because she was no longer spending emotional energy looking away.
This tracks with at least one suggestive finding from psychology. When researchers prompted participants to ponder their death as a genuine, imminent reality rather than a vague abstraction, those participants showed fewer of the defensive reactions typically triggered by reminders of mortality and engaged in more thoughtful reflection on their lives and relationships. Facing death directly, it seems, is less destabilizing than perpetually flinching away from it.
This is precisely the freedom Paul describes when he writes that we’ve been “buried with [Christ] through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” (Rom. 6:4, NIV). Our identification with Christ’s death isn’t a detour around resurrection life—it’s the path into it.
Easter Sunday Needs Good Friday
This is why we believe the church needs memento mori, perhaps especially at Easter.
Resurrection hope isn’t the denial of death; it’s death’s defeat. But a defeat never acknowledged cannot be properly celebrated. When we rush past our mortality to arrive at the empty tomb, we may find that the joy there is thinner than we expected, because we haven’t truly felt the weight of what was overcome.
Practicing memento mori doesn’t require dramatic gestures. It might mean reading Psalm 39 slowly and honestly. It might mean sitting for a few minutes each day with the awareness that this life is finite and that God is not. It might mean allowing yourself, in prayer, to bring your fear of death before the One who has already passed through it.
For congregations, it might mean recovering the practice of reading aloud the names of members who have died in the past year (as some traditions do on All Saints’ Day)—a simple act of corporate worship that refuses to let the community pretend death hasn’t visited them. Or it might mean observing Ash Wednesday, gathering as a congregation to hear the ancient words spoken over every person in the room, from the oldest member to the youngest child: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Barth was right: To remember your death is to remember your Lord. And perhaps there’s no better time to do that than in the days before we stand before an empty tomb and hear, again, that death hasn’t had the final word.
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