If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. In many ways it was not a very good prayer, because it always made me a little afraid that I would indeed die before the morning. But it also served to remind me that my life was not always in my hands.
Tonight is a night in which death is very much on our minds.
Inescapable as it was for Jesus, so it is for us. There is an old Middle Eastern parable about a servant who came home from the marketplace pale and trembling. He told his master that he had just been jostled in the crowd by a woman. When he turned to look at her he saw that the woman was Death. She had stared at him and made a threatening gesture toward him.