I believe that most people, including ourselves, do not think sufficiently about their own death, except perhaps by looking for ways and means to prolong life more and more. And yet we know all the time that death will come also to each one of us sooner or later, but with a difference.

We believe in Christ's own resurrection from the dead, but also that we too shall one day rise again, like him, to a life that has no end. Through faith we have accepted God, and God has accepted us and made us sharers of the eternal life which is His.

The post-modern world does speak with cool rationality about the possibility or impossibility of 'post-mortem' survival. Philosophers speak about the immateriality of the human soul and therefore hold that, somehow or other, it will survive after death; being itself spirit, the soul cannot be destroyed or annihilated.

Others, especially in recent times, talk about "death after death" and are fascinated by accounts of near-death experiences. Today we have also the so-called 'New Agers', who are attracted to Eastern traditions about reincarnation, even though some of them still consider themselves Christians.

Today's Gospel gives us a confirmation of what we as Christians believe about this matter. In today's Gospel we read about Jesus being faced by some Sadducees, who did not believe in the immortality of the soul and were therefore always at loggerheads with the Pharisees.

To play down these and especially to test Our Lord, they pose before him the fictitious case of a woman who had a series of seven husbands, all brothers. This is all done in good faith order according to the law, that when a man dies without a son, his brother should marry his brother's widow to raise up a son to continue his brother's name. By asserting that resurrection could present the intolerable, not to say ridiculous, situation of seven brothers with the same wife, they hoped to expose the folly of the resurrection of the dead.

Unperturbed by their efforts to trap him and make him feel ridiculous, Jesus' reply was: "Those who are found worthy to attain resurrection from the dead, take neither wife nor husband; mortal no longer, they will be like angels now that the resurrection has given them new birth." With this rejoinder, Jesus has beaten the Sadducees on their own turf, as they say.

All this reminds us that, even if we are encouraged by reasonings about the immateriality and immortality of the human soul, or even by the hints implied in near-death accounts, some of which might be quite genuine, our belief in life after death ultimately rests on supernatural faith and on our trust in a permanent covenant relationship with a loving Creator as preached and sealed by Christ our Lord.

That puts our hope in life after death in the right place, not resting on conjectures about the structure of human nature, but on the word of God coming to us in Jesus Christ. This is the basis of the supernatural virtue of hope, which is itself a gift of God. There can be no genuine hope without faith, and there can be neither of them without the virtue of love.

The virtue of hope for a Christian cannot but be a source of serenity and genuine happiness. It is said that the early Christians used to be so united and always happy that other people around them used to marvel and wondered what it was that made them so happy. They felt one in Christ and knew that they would also remain so after their own bodily death.

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