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The gospel isn’t for the strong but people who know they aren’t.
Chuck Norris was never supposed to die.
For years, he lived somewhere between man and myth. He didn’t do push-ups; he pushed the earth down. Death didn’t come for him; it asked permission. The joke was always the same, Chuck Norris was the exception.
And then he wasn’t.
That’s the jarring thing. Not just that he died—but that he died like everyone else. No final roundhouse kick to the grave. No cinematic ending. Just the same quiet reality Scripture has always told the truth about: “There is an appointed time for man to die” (Heb. 9:27).
It turns out the memes were wrong. And if we are honest, we all knew that.
However, we still make some people larger than life. Stronger than they really are. Harder to kill than the rest of us. Chuck Norris was just one of the more entertaining versions of that. But underneath the humor is something a little more serious—we want someone to be the exception. We want to believe that strength, somehow, might be enough.
Death isn’t an interruption—it’s already here, woven into everything. It tells the truth about us whether we’re ready to hear it or not.
Luther wouldn’t let us get away with that. “In the midst of life we are in death,” he wrote. Not as poetry, but as diagnosis. Death isn’t an interruption—it’s already here, woven into everything. It tells the truth about us whether we’re ready to hear it or not.
And the older I get, the harder that is to ignore.
You start to notice it in ways you didn’t before. Not just in headlines about celebrities, but in your own body. In the quiet limits you didn’t used to have. In the way time feels a little less theoretical. You don’t feel invincible anymore—if you ever really did.
Which is why the Chuck Norris myth works. Or at least, why we wanted it to.
As Helmut Thielicke spent so much of his ministry pointing out, we are remarkably good at pushing death to the edges of our awareness—until we can’t anymore. We distract ourselves. We joke about it. We build up stories about strength and toughness. Not because we believe them fully, but because they help us avoid what we know is coming.
But death has a way of cutting through all of that.
It doesn’t care about reputation. Or toughness. Or how many jokes have been told about you on the internet. It comes for all of us. For the weak and the strong, the unknown and the legendary.
Even for Chuck Norris.
And if he can’t beat it, neither can you.
That’s the part we don’t like to say out loud. But Christianity has never really been in the business of avoiding that truth. In fact, it leans straight into it. The hope of Easter is not that we might become strong enough to escape death. It’s that death itself has been dealt with by someone else.
If life were a story about strength, Chuck Norris would have been our guy. But it isn’t. Christ doesn’t defeat death by out-muscling it. He doesn’t stand at a distance and overpower it. He walks straight into it. Suffers it. Dies. And then, in a way that still sounds almost absurd when you say it out loud—he walks out the other side.
This is the strange, backward logic of the cross. God does his best work where you least expect it. Life out of death. Victory out of defeat. Strength hidden under weakness. A cross instead of a crown.
It’s not the story we would write. But it’s the only one that holds.
Which means Chuck Norris’ hope—like yours, like mine—was never going to be found in strength or legend or cultural immortality. Those things don’t last. They can’t. They were never meant to. The gospel isn’t for the strong but people who know they aren’t.
For people who are running out of time.
For people who feel their limits.
For people who are finally honest enough to admit that death is not a problem they can solve.
That’s where Easter speaks. Not by denying death, but by defeating it. Not by pretending we’re stronger than we are, but by giving us a Savior who is.
So yes, Chuck Norris died. And in that sense, he turns out to be exactly like the rest of us. And I am sad that he has died.
But that’s not the end of the story. Because the Christian hope has never been that we might become the exception—but that we belong to the One who already is. And that is a far better story than any meme ever told.
