Life beyond death

Today’s readings: 2 Maccabees 7, 1-2. 9-14; 2 Thessalonians 2,16 – 3,5; Luke 20, 27-38.

We live in a world which, in contrast with the certainties of the past, seems very confusing insofar as the basics of belief are concerned.

We easily let Halloween overlap with what we used to celebrate as the memory of the souls departed. Horoscopes and mediums abound and overlap with piety and devotion, even of regular churchgoers.

In a world itching to know the future, religion and our churches emerge as rather weak in giving account of the hope that should mark our waiting for the afterlife.

This is a major theme this Sunday, and is also the focus of the last weeks of the liturgical year. As Christians we still believe in the resurrection of the body even if we have a million difficulties to understand it. What the Church calls “the four last things” are the things that bound our earthly horizon: death, judgement, heaven and hell.

These are the things we try to forget or which the times we live in make us forget. But the moment will come when the world of time and space no longer stands in the way.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s book The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov says that “If there is no immortality, there is no virtue”. Belief in life after death cannot leave untouched our life on this side of the story.

Christian life was once envisaged as one long preparation for that big transition. But this seems very difficult to preserve in our times. Explicit belief in the resurrection encounters big problems in modern culture.

Yet in our times there has also been an unprecedented escalation of interest in life beyond death. In this confusion, we need to pin down talk about our future hope beyond earthly life without being naive or too head-in-air.

Faced with this dilemma, the readings from Maccabees and Luke are enlightening. In Maccabees, we have the only clear Old Testament text that teaches us to pray for our beloved dead, not for nostalgia but because of the resurrection.

The story of the mother and her seven sons who were tortured and killed for their faith shows how people with inner strength can stand up for what they believe in. In Luke, the Sadducees confront Jesus on the same issue of the resurrection, but from an argumentative standpoint.

When we think of destiny, it is a mistake to think only of death or what happens after. Destiny involves much more. It is the culmination of all that life was, including how one prepares for death.

In A Preface to Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis laments the “decay of logic, resulting in an untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not”. Very often we remain locked inside our arguments and lose the broader vision of things.

Our culture is one that mainly seeks explanations. But there is more to life than just explanations. Faith does not necessarily explain, but can open up to understanding, which is different from explaining.

We all recall how fearful the disciples had become after the death of Jesus. They went into hiding. The whole resurrection story became practically impossible to believe. Thomas himself was struggling to believe in Jesus and was adamant that he needed not only to see Jesus but to touch his wounds too.

Our longings give us a hint of our eternal home. Again, C.S. Lewis expressed these longings of the human heart in his essay The Weight of Glory, where he shows that although deep in our souls we are created for etenity, yet we have “a certain shyness” when talking about heaven. Perhaps we are too intellectually advanced for fairy tales.

The issue of our future hope in the resurrection is neither a fairy tale, nor mere philosophising. Jurgen Moltmann, one of the foremost German Protestant theologians of the 20th century, writes: “The immortality of the soul is an opinion – the resurrection of the body is a hope. The first is a trust in something immortal in the human being; the second is a trust in God who calls into being the things that are not, and makes the dead live.”