The Phrase ‘Memento Mori’ Still Has Meaning Today

Memento mori is Latin for “remember that you must die,” as in “the only inevitable things in life are death and taxes.” Having just recently finished my taxes, I was reminded again of the second inevitability!

Reminders of death are both accidental and intentional.  It is said that a slave would follow the chariot of a Roman general during a triumph processional whispering to him “Remember you are mortal.”

Easter is the triumph over death, but it is also a reminder that someday we too shall pass through that gate. While death is not as final and grim for us as it was to the ancient pagans, it is still a sobering prospect. We profess a risen Lord, but we still inhabit bodies with minds and emotions that resist the idea of suffering and death.

Living in the post-Resurrection world it is hard for me to imagine the attitude of people toward death in the world before the first Easter. I suspect that it was far less hopeful than our own.

Resurrections in the Bible

There are three resurrections reported in the Old Testament:

• Elijah brought the son of a widow from Zarephath who had given the prophet food and shelter back to life (1 Kings 17:17–24)
• Elisha brought the son of a Shunammite woman back to life (2 Kings 4:22-37)
• Elisha’s bones brought a man back to life when the man’s body touched Elisha’s bones when his burial party panicked at the sight of Moabite raiders and threw the body into Elisha’s grave in haste so as to escape being captured (2 Kings 13:20–21)

Of course, in each instance it was really God who performed the resurrection.  But none of these resurrections promises much hope of continued life after death for most of us.  Indeed, the accounts suggest that lives were restarted but there is nothing to suggest that the resurrected people did not go on to die again in a more timely way.

There are also a number of New Testament resurrections.  We know, for instance, that Jesus brought the dead back to life.   Also “many of the saints who had fallen asleep” rose in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’ resurrection (Matthew 27:52-53). There is, however, no suggestion that these resurrections involve life eternal, even though these accounts belong to the post-Easter world, being connected directly to Jesus.

But the Easter Resurrection is different.  It has changed the way Christendom thinks of death.

Life Eternal

My mother-in-law died when my daughter was four years old. My daughter was enrolled in a church school day care, and her initial reaction to her grandmother’s death was a pause.  She considered the information, and then asked “But she comes back alive when Jesus comes back?” (I was gratified that she was absorbing basic doctrine at her day care.)  My daughter’s question, however, is not a question that most of the children of the world would have asked at the time of Christ’s Resurrection.

The Pharisees of Jesus’ time strongly held a belief in the resurrection of the dead. It’s not clear exactly though, what was meant by this. It could have been a continuation of the spirit through an actual resurrection in the flesh.  It could also have been a kind of spiritual resurrection.  But it could have even been a reincarnation as described by the historian Josephus as well

But our view is different. Every time we say the Apostle’s or the Nicene Creed, we profess our belief in the resurrection and the life to come. The empty tomb transformed death from an inevitable, ultimate, and absolute ending.  It is now a mystery wrapped around an unimaginable wonder: life eternal.

There is no shortage of people ready to describe in detail their idea of what this means – how it will work and what it will be like. Some descriptions are simple and relatively concrete, like my daughter’s idea that her grandmother would come back alive when Jesus returns.  Others are more elaborate and complex images, like in Dante’s Paradiso.

Judgement

Memento mori was common in art for much of the last 1,200 years or so.  Now it is much less so. But it does not seem reasonable that we have suddenly become less aware of death or less concerned about it in the last 50 or 100 years.  I think what may have changed is our aversion to judgment.

Some time in my late teens or early 20s, that being the late 60s and early to mid 70s, being “judgmental” became a social accusation of great weight and importance.  It was something to be avoided if at all possible. Thinking of my daughter’s reaction to her grandmother’s death, I now see that there was no concern about judgment after death. It was just curiosity about resurrection (and perhaps the timing).

All this leads me to wonder if we do not, perhaps, need a replacement for memento mori. Perhaps we should consider memento iudicaberis – remember that you will be judged.

Our aversion to the idea of judgment – to being judged and to being seen as judgmental – seems to me to have grown steadily throughout my lifetime. I was once in a study group designed to prepare people for lay ministry and I happened to mention that people would be less offended if you were to call them ugly than if you to tell them they were wrong about something. The reaction of the group was illuminating.  The members were almost unanimously of the opinion that telling someone he or she is wrong is incredibly rude and unacceptable.

Memento Mori

But is that not, at the heart of it, the reason for the old memento mori? To raise in someone the awareness that if death catches them in sin – being wrong in a particularly fatal way – that the consequences could be eternal? Modern medicine has pushed the immediacy of death further into the future for people today than it was in earlier times. And modern culture has done essentially the same for judgment.

The Resurrection is good news indeed . . . but eternal life still comes after judgment. I do not know that we need to work to bring back the common use of the memento mori. But it might serve us well to occasionally remember that our cultural aversion to judgment is no more a protection against it than our aversion to death will negate our mortality.