Years ago I had the great delight of seeing Kathleen Chalfant star in Margaret Edson’s play “Wit,” sometimes written “W;t” in reference to the recurring theme of commas vs. semi-colons in one of John Donne’s holy sonnets. Chalfant played Vivian, an English scholar of markedly misanthropic tendencies diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer. Over the course of the play she suffers through the side-effects of aggressive treatment, which finally fails, just as she struggles through what the death awaiting her means. Is it the end, as rigid a division from life as a semi-colon? Or is death—compromised by what Christ has done—merely a comma, passing from one life with him to another?

You can see an excellent performance of the role of Vivian by Emma Thompson in a made-for-TV movie (it appears to be available on youtube in its entirety). But the problem is the last few seconds, which betray this extraordinary story. In the play that I saw at Union Square Theater (and in the script itself), the attending nurses see one thing: a woman dying and a mistaken attempt to resuscitate her, sending them all into a panic. What they don’t see is Vivian, dead, rising up off the table, stripping away her hospital clothes, moving toward a little light. In the final moment of the play, the light is on her alone, naked and unashamed, reaching up in a pool of brilliant light. It was the most powerful vision of the resurrection I have ever seen. It was also—perhaps not coincidentally—the most un-obscene naked body I have ever seen depicted in any artform.

It’s no great surprise that a TV movie couldn’t end quite that way. But the substitution betrays a complete lack of understanding about the meaning of the play. In the final moments, the camera shows Vivian lying in her hospital bed, shaved head, cancerous pallor, in a coma or perhaps already gone. There is a voiceover of herself reading the John Donne sonnet, and the image fades from the hospital-Vivian to a photograph of a younger, healthier Vivian, and that’s the last thing we see as the poem concludes, “Death, thou shalt die.” But the imagery contradicts the poem. This is no vision of the resurrection at all, but a memorial for a great woman whose passing we mourn. Having seen the play, I was shocked at the movie’s failure. After watching Vivian’s struggle, poetic and otherwise, a memorial just doesn’t cut it. Either there is a life after death, a life with God Who cannot be bound by death, or the struggle is a valiant farce at best.

We Christians grieve at Jesus’ death, but not grief at the loss of a good man who could’ve made the world a better place and got knocked off by the bad guys, end of story. And those of us Christians in the northern hemisphere may appreciate nature’s cooperation in giving us all the flowers and green and growth of springtime after the gray and white deadness of winter, but we do not celebrate at Easter the principle of the cyclical return of life every year. Our holy week is neither memorial nor circle-of-life ritual. It’s life through death to life again, new life not simply renewed life, following Jesus who lived and died and rose again. We have only to endure “one short sleep past,” and then we too will rise up, in the twinkling of an eye, at the call of the last trumpet, to life everlasting with Christ our Lord.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou’rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more, Death, thou shalt die.