Grin of the Living Dead
March 17, 2008
By Scott Harrup
I admit it. I’m one of those people who stare closely into a
casket when attending a funeral. I’m always looking for that hint of a breath.
When I stare hard enough I can just about convince myself I see the tiniest
movement, the ghost of a rise and fall in the chest. Doesn’t matter if I know
the deceased has been embalmed and there’s not the remotest chance of a coma
being mistaken for death. I still look.
With a Barnes and Noble Christmas gift card, I recently
picked up a copy of Frozen in Time by Owen Beattie and John Geiger.
Anthropologist Beattie’s team exhumed the bodies of three sailors from the
ill-fated 1845 Franklin expedition to the Arctic. The expedition’s ships,
Terror and Erebus, vanished. But the three crewmen had been buried on a remote
rocky island early in the voyage. Examining the bodies, Beattie’s team
uncovered clues to the fate of the rest of the crew. Modern analysis points to
malnutrition and lead poisoning as the causes of death. Deserted, the ships
would have been crushed by shifting ice.
But those three recovered bodies — they have a life of
their own in an eerie sort of way. The frigid arctic conditions basically
freeze-dried the corpses. The eyes of one John Torrington, only 20 years old at
his death, are open in published photographs. His lips pull back in an
almost-grin.
“Every time we find the well-preserved body of someone who
died long ago — an Egyptian mummy, a freeze-dried Incan sacrifice, a
leathery Scandinavian bog-person, the famous iceman of the European Alps,”
writes best-selling author Margaret Atwood in the introduction to Frozen in
Time, “there’s a similar fascination. Here is someone who has defied the
general ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust rule, and who has remained recognizable as
an individual human being long after most have turned to bone and earth. In the
Middle Ages, unnatural results argued unnatural causes, and such a body would
either have been revered as saintly or staked through the heart. In our age,
try for rationality as we may, something of the horror classic lingers: the
mummy walks, the vampire awakes. It’s so difficult to believe that one who
appears to be so nearly alive is not conscious of us.”
A melding of death and life touches each of us at the core
of our spiritual journey. Read the Book of Romans and you’ll find the apostle
Paul reflecting on his “dead” identity as a sinner separated from God, and the
new life Christ brought him at salvation. Because Paul still inhabited his
earthly body when he wrote Romans, he still struggled with personal tendencies
from his sinful past.
The happy ending to Paul’s somewhat macabre narrative comes
in Romans 7:24-8:2.
“What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body
of death? Thanks be to God — through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I
myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to
the law of sin. Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in
Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me
free from the law of sin and death” (NIV).
All followers of Christ struggle with some of the habits and
desires from our “dead” past. But all of us can count on a day when we will
forever bid farewell to death and embrace eternal life in God’s presence.
— Scott Harrup is senior associate editor of Today’s
Pentecostal Evangel and blogs at Out There (sharrup.agblogger.org).
