Conquering Death ?

We hear and learn, when we are of Christian culture, a certain automatic sentence: the power of this sentence, the sudden and definitive sword movement that it strikes, does not seem to me to allow the deepening of spirituality.

Here it is: “Through the experience of the Cross and the Resurrection, Jesus “overcame death.”
Today I cannot curb an impression of discomfort regarding the representation of the world, with regard to my personal journey, that such a statement implies: this is a childish reading of the experience of the Christ: a hero who comes to “kill death.”
This is the result of such a limited view of the spheres of consciousness.

I admit I may as well be the victim of another limited view making me understand this sentence as I do now.

This sentence only reflects to me a reading which is held from the most superficial perspective : a simplistic, binary and ultra polarized representation of the life/death couple, as well as a necessity to fight physical death.
Other traditions help to highlight the weakness of such a statement (the climax of a narrative process at the end of which our hero fights evil death.)

Throughout time, and outside of time, Jesus has already conquered death, that is to say transcended the comings and goings, the inherent stagnation of a life/death limited understanding.

With this sentence, we touch the limits of an attempt of narrating spiritual realities.
The difficulty behind this statement lies in the desire to put death at bay, to make it the enemy to be fought, which is precisely an anti-wisdom.
The characteristic of the adolescent who, through his physical abilities on the one hand and the absence of knowledge on the other, thinks he is immortal (puerility), believes himself to be stronger than death.

It is also possible that this phrase repeated since childhood among the Christian communities aims to highlight the incredible impulse of life that Christ inspires.
However, it reflects a certain clumsiness, the result of a childish understanding/integration of wisdom teachings relating to the acceptance of aging and death.

I admit here, again that clumsiness may be all mine, as I may be unable, to this day, to understand such a sentence. My perception abilities could as well be too limited to allow me to fully embrace the heart of the underlying reality….
in which case, I’d be sincerely grateful for any light one might shed on this.

©FJ April 2024
Recueils / Participation/ Groupe De Pratique