When I was fourteen, I attended the funeral of an acquaintance who had died in a car accident. She was just sixteen, and it was the first funeral I’d ever attended for someone close to my age. I remember how much I cried, how wrong it felt to bury a teenage girl, how unfair it was to die in a car wreck when you had just learned how to drive. Though I didn’t know her well, I thought about this girl’s death for weeks, troubled by how close mortality now seemed. Her death made me feel vulnerable. I’d felt invincible during my childhood up to that point. Not anymore. I thought of her from time to time throughout my teen years, a cautionary tale of what could happen if you didn’t stay alert. I borrowed the event of her death to think about my own life, what could happen, and how to stay alive. I should have wept for her short life lost, but honestly, I wept for myself and how her death made me feel. And fear.
We do that a lot. Borrow a death. When was the last time you were at a funeral when someone didn’t take the opportunity to talk about their own life when eulogizing the person who has died? We all do it. It’s nearly impossible not to. You’re standing in the aisle talking with an acquaintance about how close you were to the deceased, trying to get them to see that there’s a reason for your tears. You’re listening during the eulogy, trying to decide what you’d say if you got up to speak, what you would say if someone gave you the microphone, what you would share to let them know you should be there—because your life was connected to the person you lost.
We feel the ache of loss or the awakening of mortality and then we think about how it impacts us, our lives, our time, our emotions. No matter the importance of the person who died, we grieve for the way it makes us feel. It’s an appropriation of grief, of life, of emotions. The funeral is less about the person we lost and more about we who are left behind. And I’m not sure there’s any other way. If, one day, you are standing at my funeral mourning the way you feel in the wake of my passing, I am happy for you to appropriate my death. Borrow it. It will mean that my life meant something to you. That our lives were connected, that we have a right and a reason to be sad. I don’t think it’s wrong to live so tangled up in one another’s lives that we can’t process a lost life without mourning how it changes us who are left to grieve.
This is, of course, what we are invited to do with Jesus’ death. Appropriate it. “Do this in remembrance of me,” he said to the disciples gathered around the bread and the cup right before his crucifixion (Luke 22:19). Remember his death, believe that it is for your life, be changed by it. Proclaim it until he comes (1 Cor. 11:26). Identify with it like Paul, who wrote: “For I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me,” (Gal. 2:20). I died when Jesus died, and I will never be the same. His death did something to me. His life did something for me.
But this is a death we don’t just borrow for our own benefit. We also celebrate it, which is not something we ordinarily do with death. Celebrate death? Death, the enemy? Why would we celebrate? Because Jesus’ death was the one to end the hopelessness of death for us. Paul is eulogizing Jesus a little: “the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). This is how Jesus’ death and life impacted Paul, how the life and death of a man from Galilee (and before that, heaven) touched, changed, meant something for Paul. Paul didn’t just need Jesus’ death to mean something for him. He knew it already had. And forever would. He borrowed Jesus’ death so that his life would have meaning, and that is the only time it ever works like that. We may, at many points in our lives, grab hold of a death and say, “This person made my life matter, made me who I am.” And it may be true to some extent. A father shapes, a mother prays, a best friend loves, a child teaches. But there is only one borrowed death that changes us at our very core. Only one borrowed death that creates new life. Only one borrowed death that stood on the neck of Death itself and came out alive on the other side.
We can think of Jesus’ death in terms of appropriation. We should. He meant for us to know him for his sacrifice. He wasn’t coerced, neither was he disgruntled. He laid down his life willingly as a ransom for many. That was his plan all along. His life for yours.
To appropriate means to take something for your own use or possession. So, appropriate Jesus’ death. Borrow it that you may live. One day we won’t need it anymore for we will live—live—with him forever. That’s what his death does when we take it for our own use. That’s why he died. And why he was raised.
To appropriate means to take something for your own use or possession. So, appropriate Jesus’ death. Borrow it that you may live. Share on XPhoto by Seval Torun on Unsplash
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness (Crossway), and Memorizing Scripture (Moody). Connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
