The last enemy

Former Senator Ben Sasse is dying of cancer. Today at Mere Orthodoxy, I found this quotation from an interview. Ben Sasse:

...[A] lot is broken in this world. The existence of death is surely not the way it's supposed to be. So Jesus weeping, what a gift. The story is amazing. The whole, the whole Lazarus story and his sister's weirdly narcissistic behavior, that's us, right? Like we're dying in the story too. We're many of the characters, but we're definitely that egotistical, self-absorbed, "Jesus, why didn't you do it the way I want you to do it?"

But to our point about short attention spans, first, let's just go back and read that story and a dozen adjacent stories. The Bible is so rich and we spend so little time reading it together. Jesus weeps there, and he knows that he's gonna raise Lazarus five minutes later. So it's an amazing story because he's acknowledging that death is terrible, and yet death doesn't win. The Christian phrase in Christian literature for years has been to call death "the last enemy."

Death is a wicked thief, it's an enemy, but it's pretty great that it's the last enemy. All the stuff that I regret for having been an inadequate husband and son and father and friend and worker, truth teller, all the stuff that I've been weak on, I'm gonna be freed from all of that. Death is the last enemy. (more)

Jake Meador, "The Bright Sadness of Ben Sasse," Mere Orthodoxy, Feb. 19, 2026.