In this article I reappropriate the language of sleep in relation to death and to resurrection.
Christians are already awake. Baptism awakens us to a new reality: a splash of cold water awakens
us to resurrection living. The letter to the Ephesians contains a wakeup call,
‘Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you’. (Ephesians
5.14). NT Wright suggests that this quotation is from an early Christian song
or poem. If that is the case then sleep
imagery has been embedded in Christian thought from the very beginning.
Sleeping, waking and rising from the dead are intimately connected and sleep,
as a metaphor, itself becomes exhausted. This is the rising to the new and
glorious day of each day of creation and, ‘the day which the Lord hath made, we
will rejoice and be glad in it’ (Psalm 118.24).
Sleep through resurrection eyes: the
death of a euphemism
Anthony Thiselton explores 1
Corinthians 15 with the Pauline construal of the ‘Christological heart’ as the
key to unlocking Christian language of resurrection, which is being in
Christ. So, he notes:
The metaphor of sleep for death on the part of
believers who are “in Christ” was important in the earliest Christian faith,
for the logical “grammar” of sleep (koimao) carries with it the
expectation of awaking to a new dawn and a new day, ie the expectation
of resurrection and the gift of renewed life and vigor [sic] (cf v. 51). It
also anticipates the triumphant hope of the removal of the sting (to
kentron), v. 55) of death when God through Christ has dealt with sin (v. 56).[i]
This ‘grammar of sleep’ is important.
Typically the problem with using sleep as euphemism for death is that it
cheapens what death is about and denies its finality. And yet this is what the
resurrection of Jesus Christ does: death is conquered and loses its sting.
Thistelton cites Oscar Cullmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg who have explored this
‘profound image’:
Cullmann compares the “wrongness” of death in pre-Christian
biblical tradition with the deceptive optimism concerning death as “release”
from the body in such Greek thinkers as Socrates. Only after the horror of
Christ’s death can death “lose its sting”. Hence while “with sublime calm
Socrates drinks the hemlock…Jesus…cries, ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou
forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:37)….This is not ‘death as a friend’. This is death in
all its frightful horror….’the last enemy’ of God (Cullmann’s italics).
Because it is God’s enemy it separates us from God. But once a person has
grasped “the horror of death” it becomes possible to join Paul in the hymn of victory:
‘Death is swallowed up – in victory’ (1 Corinthians 15.54-55). Hence, if a
Christian encounters death as an experience which has lost its sting, “the most
usual image for Paul is: ‘they are asleep’….Death has lost its horror.
Pannenberg points out that the logic of ‘waking’ is entailed in the notion of
sleep: it promises resurrection: “The familiar experience of being awakened and
rising from sleep serves as a parable for the completely unknown destiny
expected for the dead”[ii]
As Thiselton says of the metaphor of
sleep, ‘[it] regularly denotes the experience of death for Christians as
pregnant with hope and becomes a standard term’.
It is out of resurrection that the
eschatological dimension of sleep is illustrated in this language of the early
Christians, specifically Paul’s view of eschatological imminence. This turns on
the phrase in 1 Corinthians 15.51, pantes hou koimethesometha. Thiselton
highlights its three possible meanings:
either (i) none of us shall sleep, i.e., the Parousia
will intervene before any believer dies; or (ii) not all of us shall (as
some of us shall) sleep i.e., the Parousia will come in the lifetime of
some of us; or (iii) Not all of us humans shall sleep, i.e., the Parousia
will interrupt human history at some point sooner or later (time
unspecified).[iii]
Sleep as a resurrection metaphor has
the capacity to generate this eschatological language. The last trumpet
suggests both a signal of proclamation but also a wakeup call. It also connects
this eschatological language to the image of the watchman who is deliberately
awake whilst others sleep. Christ is the watchman par excellence who slept in
the tomb is raised and by incorporation into his life shares with the Father,
in the power of the Spirit, the capacity to raise all people. It is only if
Christ has not been raised from the dead that those who have fallen asleep (or,
in the New Revised Standard Version ‘died’) have truly perished, never
to waken. That is the sleep of Sheol.
Dead or sleeping?
We saw above that Jesus’ declaration
that Lazarus had fallen asleep and needed to be awakened caused confusion
amongst the disciples. Paul’s treatment of death, sleep and resurrection in 1
Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians 15 informs how we may read John 11 and Luke 8 -
Lazarus and the raising of Jairus’ daughter - with a Christological heart.
And yet a problem remains. In Wright’s
work on resurrection sleep is a recurrent metaphor for death, and waking for
resurrection. Wright suggests that in these two passages, ‘The disciples’ reaction,
taking “sleep” literally, shows that for John at least, as for Mark in the
story of Jairus’ daughter, this was not so habitual metaphor for death as to
leave no room for explanation’. There is ambiguity in the gospels around sleep
and death. This is illustrated in the misunderstandings of the disciples and
the mocking of Jairus’ family. The problem is illustrated as an issue in
biblical translation: how should the words koimao
and katheudo be translated? They both
mean ‘to sleep’ and are used across the New Testament.
In an apparent effort to de-euphemise
the word ‘sleep’ the New Revised Standard Version translates koimao as it appears in 1 Corinthians 15
as ‘though some have died’ rather than ‘some have fallen asleep’.
A footnote confirms that the Greek is ‘fallen asleep’. This sucks out the
meaning from a key metaphor and glosses over the interplay of the narrative in
the accounts of Lazarus and Jairus’ daughter that leads the hearers and reader
to understand that these events are connected to the resurrection of Jesus
Christ.
In the case of Jairus’ daughter the
girl’s sleep has been another occasion, in which God’s resurrection
power in Jesus has been demonstrated. The reaction to this is scornful because
they knew she was dead. As Evans notes, ‘[h]ere death is not spoken of as sleep
but is contrasted with it - “she is not dead but is dead” would be nonsense’.
The verbs used in the New Testament for resurrection, egeirein, ‘to
raise up’ and anistanai, ‘to get up’ can also both mean ‘to awake out of
sleep’. The wordplay is used in Ephesians 5 and John 11.11-13. Wright comments
that:
The mention of ‘sleep’ leads the mind naturally to the
description of the girl’s ‘awakening’. Jesus’ word of command (Mark and Luke
only) is egeire, ‘arise’, which in Mark translates the Aramaic word talitha
koum. When the girl awakens, the verb used by Mark and Luke is aneste,
and in Matthew is egerthe.[iv]
The key point in the use of sleep is
that a Christian will ‘certainly think of Jesus’ own resurrection as a larger
and greater instance of the same sort of astonishing power’. Wright notes that
no one in the story expects resurrection in the way that a post-resurrection
gospel writer or reader knows it, for them Jarius’ daughter, as Lazarus, will
die again someday; the evangelists ‘end up telling a story about Jesus going
through death and out the other side’.
The defining text for Barth in his
consideration of sleep within his Church Dogmatics is from the Raising
of Lazarus as Jesus says to Martha, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those
who believe in me, even though they die, will live’ (John 11.25). Barth says
that in this text the New Testament’s conviction is that, ‘the “death” in death
can be abolished’. As the story of Lazarus demonstrates, Barth notes, this
achievement is not within human control but is ‘always the result of God’s
extraordinary intervention’. Barth sees the final revelation in the coming
again of Christ, ‘in which the exaltation that has already occurred in Jesus
Christ will be made manifest’. This will apply to the dead as much as to the
living (citing 1 Thessalonians 4.16f), hence why the language of sleep is so
pregnant with meaning since they sleep ‘in Christ’ (1 Corinthians 15.18) and
‘in Jesus’ (1 Thessalonians 4.14). ‘Even though they die [they] will live’:
‘death’ says Barth, ‘now wears a guise in which we can look it in the face’.
The King slept
The confident adoption of sleep in
relation to death and resurrection and in an eschatological sense, as a
generative metaphor and not as a linguistic masking agent is shown in
post-resurrection writing of which two examples will be given.
Luke’s account of the death of Stephen
(Acts 7.54-end) illustrates this confidence in the sleep metaphor. Stephen dies
during a highly traumatic lynching which bears features of the Passion of
Christ. Luke Timothy Johnson notes these distinct echoes not least in the
phrase, ‘when he said this, he died’, the words used of the death Jesus on the
cross in Luke 23.46. The significant difference is that the word for ‘died’,
(or ‘expired, breathe one’s last) is replaced with the word for ‘falling
asleep’. The benignity of falling asleep sits at odds with a violent death. So
appropriating sleep as an image of that sort of death is hard. Barth seeks to
distinguish being asleep from falling asleep. This leads him to
say that since Jesus has won the victory, ‘all the [New Testament Christians]
had to do was to fall asleep’. It is hard to conceive of Stephen’s death being
one in which all he had to do was fall asleep, and yet, Barth’s suggests, ‘we
really look to Jesus Christ, who, as “the first fruits of them that
slept’…robbed death of its sting and brought life and immortality to light even
when they were in extremis, so that this death could not be anything but
a falling asleep’.
This is about looking at someone who
has ‘fallen asleep’ and seeing that person as delivered from death even in
their dying. Thus for Barth the early Christians never sought to ask what it is
like to be dead or speculating on an intermediate state but rather holding on
to the confession, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’, and, he says, ‘in the
light of this hope they came to see in the visible process of dying the last
conclusive symptom of a life surrounded by the peace of God’. So the move from
euphemism to metaphor is completed, a metaphor freighted with the Biblical
witness of those who have already fallen asleep, the proclamation that God
gives his beloved rest and watches over his people unceasingly and sealed in
the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
The second example is from an anonymous
‘Ancient Paschal Homily’ for Holy Saturday. In it Jesus is described as the
‘King who sleeps’ following his death, and because of this, ‘the earth was in
terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who
were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has
trembled.’ The homily imagines how Christ, the New Adam, now in the regions of
death goes to seek out the first Adam, ‘And grasping his hand he raises him up,
saying: ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you
light.’ The use of sleep as a resurrection metaphor is striking in the call to
awaken and arise: ‘Come forth, and those in darkness: Have light, and those who
sleep: Rise’.
Even the crucifixion, a traumatic death
as in the stoning of Stephen, is seen in the light of the sleep metaphor, `I
slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side, for you, who slept in paradise
and brought forth Eve from your side. My side healed the pain of your side; my
sleep will release you from your sleep in Hades.’ This is vivid and immediate
language and reclaims sleep as a metaphor and does not side-line it as a
pastorally unsafe or damaging.
Depictions of the resurrection of Jesus
Christ in art juxtapose the vigorous waking Jesus with sleeping guards in
various poses of discomfort around the tomb. The guards are sleeping because
they see neither the power of Christ nor the ‘capacious metaphor’ of sleep.
Ratzinger captures what has happened with sleep, that sleep is ‘a portmanteau
term for being dead – a term which Christians filled with their own content,
namely the idea of (conscious) life with the Lord’.
[i]
Thistelton, A.C. (2000) The First Epistle to the Corinthians. William B
Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, MI. 1220.
[ii]
Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians. 603-604.
[iii]
Thiselton, The First Letter to the Corinthians. 1293.
