I grew up in Indiana in the fifties and sixties, before there were impersonal interstate highways built in the middle of nowhere. The roads back then twisted around farms and homes and followed trails through woods that seemed to surround my hometown. We hadn’t discovered the ozone layer yet, cars weighed about the same as a freight train, and fuel efficiency was of no concern to anybody.

Even before I had started driving, I loved going for rides in the country with my mother and sisters. We would pick a direction, try to find a road we’d never been on, and see where it took us. I saw a lot of western Indiana on those Sunday morning journeys.

Inevitably, it seems, we always came across some kind of roadkill as we drove through the countryside. Dogs, cats, skunks, opossums, and an occasional deer. (We never worried about hitting a deer or anything: our ‘55 Chevy had thick steel fenders and could likely survive a high-speed collision with Godzilla.)

Now I’m in Texas and I still see lots of roadkill. Not so many opossums down here; armadillos, sort of an armor-plated opossum, have largely taken their place on the blacktop graveyards where I drive. They tend to be neater: opossums have a way of splattering all over the place while armadillos tend bleed out from below. They lie there in the sun, awaiting the arrival of crows the size of Buicks to devour them.

What has always struck me about roadkill, regardless of their genus or species, is just how dead they are. They’re not just a little bit dead or politely dead: they are dead in a big, irreversible way. (Sometimes when I’m with one of my daughters, we’ll come across some roadkill and I’ll comment on what good actors those critters are, playing ‘possum like they are. They groan and romanticize about how the survivors must miss them so, as if life were Bambi and I was the SOB that just shot Mother.)

Death is a stark reality, a fact we are shielded from in our “civilized” (”sanitized”) society. Few of us have watched someone die before our eyes or seen the lifeless, baby-doll eyes of a corpse. We don’t fully comprehend the punctuation point at the end of our life sentence; as a result, we don’t really appreciate life or death as we should.

Jesus died. Set aside all the truths about our salvation, sin, the eternal decrees, atonement, prophecy, and all the other clean categories of theological thought and focus on this one thing: Jesus was as dead as roadkill when they pulled his battered, bleeding body off the cross that Friday afternoon. He was pierced in His wrists, ankles, and side. He bled onto the ground. His back looked like it had been in a boat propeller. He looked bad and smelled bad. The smell of death was on Him.

Just like roadkill. Utterly dead. No life. No breath. No heartbeat. As dead as roadkill.

And just as likely to stay that way, except . . .

The Christian message – the Christian life – is about death: His death and our death. It is about Him dying and being dead; it is about us dying daily and being dead to the world and ourselves. Christianity is about Him saying no to His own self-preservation instincts and dying like roadkill for us. It is about us saying no to our own desires and living instead for someone who became roadkill for us. We are to die.

So the next time you come upon roadkill, think about two things: think about how dead Jesus Christ was for your sake, and think about how dead you should be to yourself and the things of this world. Think about how you should have no more response to your own desires and the lure of the world than Jesus had when He died on the cross.

Be just like Him: dead to this world, dead to yourself; unresponsive to the things of this life.

As dead as roadkill.


2 Cor 1:13