The Oncologist Who Danced

In 2019, Dr. William Matsui at Johns Hopkins watched a patient named Gerald, a retired Baltimore bus driver, ring the brass bell mounted on the oncology ward wall — the bell patients ring when they finish their final round of chemotherapy. Gerald had been diagnosed with aggressive lymphoma eighteen months earlier. His family had gathered in the hallway expecting the worst. But on that Tuesday morning, Gerald grabbed the bell's rope and rang it so hard the nurses down the corridor started clapping. Then he turned to Dr. Matsui and said, "Death came knocking, but nobody was home."

Dr. Matsui later told an interviewer that in twenty years of oncology, he never got tired of watching patients taunt the disease that had tried to destroy them. "There's something primal about it," he said. "They don't just survive. They mock it."

That is exactly the tone Paul strikes in his letter to the Corinthians. He does not whisper about death with polite reverence. He taunts it. "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" This is not the language of someone barely holding on — it is the language of someone ringing a bell in the hallway, daring death to try again. The sting has been drawn. The venom is gone. And the reason is not human resilience or medical triumph. The reason is the risen Christ. Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ — not a partial remission, but a complete and irreversible cure.