Curtain Call

 “To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

Than fly to others that we know not of?”

— Hamlet, Acts 3, Scene 1 Lines 78-83

In the summer of 2015 I witnessed something I had long desired to experience. For as long as I can remember I have loved movies. The first movie I remember seeing was a rerunning of Star Wars at the Moonglo Drive In when I was around five years old. Something about the mixture of a giant screen displaying epic space battles against the backdrop of the night sky captured my interest and over forty years later it still hasn’t let go. I sometimes wonder if being an only child contributed to this fascination. Growing up without siblings there were many days with no one to play with or talk to, so movie characters became surrogate companions. Somewhere through the years the line separating reality and fantasy became less blurred and I realized Darth Vader was just a man in a suit, whose voice was portrayed by a completely different man in a studio, who was merely repeating the words written by a completely different person sitting in front of a typewriter. It was this realization that caused my love of movies to expand beyond the finished product and become a curiosity about the process of making it. Pulaski, Tennessee is far from Hollywood, both in geography and philosophy, so my opportunity to get a glimpse behind the scenes at the making of a movie was about as far fetched as people fighting with light sabers in deep space, until the summer of 2015.

Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I have led church groups to the New Orleans suburb of Chalmette, Louisiana to work with the Chalmette Church of Christ in evangelistic efforts. In the seventeen years since the storm, I have witnessed the city of Chalmette undergo a complete transformation from complete destruction to a complete rebuild and revival. In the decade following Katrina, Hollywood and Louisiana began a partnership where movie production was being outsourced in a mutually beneficial partnership. Hollywood got to make movies cheaper, due to lower costs and tax breaks, and Louisiana’s economy got a boost to the influx of money and jobs surrounding the movie industry. It was during this time that the former Lowe’s property next door to the Chalmette Church of Christ became a film lot used by movie companies. In the summer of 2015 I finally got a glimpse behind the curtain at the filming of a major motion picture, Deepwater Horizon, starring Mark Wahlberg. The production company constructed a replica of the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil drilling platform a few hundred yards from the church parking lot, complete with green screens, massive lighting rigs hoisted by cranes, controlled explosions and other mechanisms of movie making magic. I was at once amazed and anticipating seeing the finished product on the big screen. When I finally saw the movie, over a year later, it was astonishing to see what appeared to my eyes to be a massive offshore oil platform in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, while simultaneously remembering that this all was actually taking place in a parking lot in Chalmette, Louisiana. Since that day I’ve watched a half dozen or more movies in various states of being filmed throughout the greater New Orleans area. Everything looks different now that I have seen behind the curtain.

I thought of this day recently while I was contemplating death and some of the things that the Bible tells us about it. Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die” (John 11:25-26), but we also know that we have attended funerals for Christians and stood looking at their dead bodies. How do we reconcile what Jesus says about never dying with what we have clearly seen with our own eyes? For me, it is best understood through the lens of watching a movie compared to watching the filming of a movie. Sitting in the audience, in the dark, watching projections on a screen, we see things that entertain us through a variety of emotions (joy, laugher, anger, terror, dread, grief) and yet, having witnessed the filming of a movie I no longer sit in the dark, so to speak. I have seen behind the curtain and I know that what my eyes are seeing isn’t real, it just appears this way from a certain perspective. On this side of the veil of death our perspective is limited as though separated by a curtain. I believe it is more significant than mere irony that when Jesus died the veil/curtain of the temple sanctuary separating the place where God dwells from the place where humans live was torn open. Through Jesus and the writings of those to whom God has revealed these mysteries, we now have a behind the scenes look at what really happens at the point of death. Paul says things like, “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8) which is “far better” because “to die is gain” since we go to be with Christ (Philippians 1:21-23). Even the ancients understood more vaguely that death was not all that is seemed from this side of the veil. The righteous man “is taken away from evil, he enters into peace” (Isaiah 57:1-2) in death, where “the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7). When my flesh takes its final breath and my eyes close for the last time, the scriptures say that they will open again in the presence of God. We were created to live in the presence of God who is life, life that is truly living (John 10:10; 1 Timothy 6:19).

What we see when we stand over a lifeless body in a casket is but a veiled illusion, an audience perspective where reality is hidden by a curtain we call death. What we naively call the afterlife is actually the opposite. It is the beginning of life, true life, the fullness of life, eternal life. Dying is the experience where the curtain is removed showing us how things really are, and the reality is that true life can only be fully experienced in the presence of the Lord. Until then, as believers, we live out our lives as best we can, with the knowledge that it will be limited for a time. We live our lives in the presence of God, though we cannot see Him with our eyes or hear Him with our ears or touch Him with our hands, we know He is there and in time we will see Him face to face.

I’m glad that the Bible speaks about death, otherwise our understanding of it would be terribly limited. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we would be stifled by the fact that death is a mysterious, unknown country to which we all must travel and yet none of us have ever returned to give a report or description. But now, because of Jesus, all of that has changed. Darth Vader is scary on a movie screen, but he isn’t real. His real name was David Prowse and he was just wearing a costume like a child at Halloween. The voice I heard in the movie wasn’t even his voice, it was James Earl Jones, who also voiced the kind cartoon character Mufasa in The Lion King. Death is no more real for the believer than Darth Vader. On this side of the curtain death looks pretty scary, but Jesus has torn open the curtain and unmasked death, so now we can sing the victory song, “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55) and we can proclaim, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. . . . They may rest from their labors” (Revelation 14:13).