Fr. JC Maximilian

[A stone from the Basillica of St. John the Evangelist in Ephesus, Turkey.  From my photos, taken 2007]

What will happen to us after we die?  Is death simply the end, like the snuffing out of a candle?  If there is life after death, what is it like?  All of us have questions such as these.  In fact, these are the type of questions that really make us human.  Neither dogs nor cats nor any other animal ask themselves these type of questions.  These deep, existential questions are only asked by us human beings.  November, the month in which we celebrate All Soul’s day, is a time when the Church calls us to ask these questions so that we can have certainty as to the answers.

The brothers in today’s first reading from the second book of Maccabees were certain of their answers to these questions.  On the surface it might seem like a rather silly reason to suffer torture and death – all because they would not eat a piece of pork.  How often do we eat a ham sandwich or some bacon without giving it a second thought?  Yet this is what the seven brothers were asked to do, with their mother, just to eat some pork yet they chose to die instead.  Why?

Well, of course what they were being asked to do was so much more than just simply to eat some pork.  They were being asked to give up their faith in God, and instead believe in the false gods of the Greeks.  At that time, the Greeks where the very height of civilization, so the brothers and their mother were being told to give up their “old-fashioned” and “superstitious” beliefs and embrace the “modern” world.  Sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it?  How often are our religious beliefs held up by the modern world as being “old-fashioned” and “superstitious”?  Just look at the rash of books that have been on the New York Times Bestseller list recently which attack belief in God as irrational, old-fashioned, superstitious, and even dangerous.  The pagan gods of the Greeks have been replaced by our modern gods of genetics, physics, cosmology, economics, and the entire pantheon of the sciences, both natural and social.

The brothers in the today’s first reading knew that there was something more important than this life.  As the first brother said right before he died, “You accursed fiend, you are depriving us of this present life, but the King of the world will raise us up to live again forever.  It is for his laws that we are dying.”  Do we have that same kind of faith in God’s promise of eternal life if we obey His commandments and follow His will?

Today’s Gospel account makes it clear that there were still those during Jesus’ time who did not believe in anything beyond this life on earth.  Among the various sects of Jews, it was the Sadducees who did not believe in an afterlife, so they try to trip Jesus up with their ridiculous hypothetical question.  They were really just trying to make the whole idea of life after death look ridiculous, and Jesus could have dismissed them as just being frivolous.  Rather, Jesus took the opportunity to teach them, and us, about what the next life will be like.

Jesus points out that life beyond death is not simply a prolongation of life on earth.  Rather it is something entirely new.  Maybe a better way of saying it than “life after death” is to call it “life beyond death.”  So what will life beyond death be like?  Of course our finite minds cannot fully answer that question, but St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, gives an excellent description:

    “Eternal life is the perfect fulfillment of desire, because each of the blessed will have more than he desired or hoped for.  In this life, no one can fulfill his desires, nor can any creature satisfy a man’s craving.  God alone satisfies and infinitely surpasses man’s desires, which therefore can never rest except in God.”

Pope Benedict XII, in Benedictus Deus, wrote that the souls in heaven “see the divine essence with an intuitive and even face-to-face vision, without interposition of any creature . . . . Those who see the divine essence in this way receive great joy from it.”
The basic truth of Jesus’ teaching, from today’s Gospel passage, is that our hope of life beyond death is not based on wishful thinking but on the nature of God Himself.  Yes, in philosophy we can talk of God as being the “first cause” and the “unmoved mover”, yet He is infinitely more than that.  Jesus reveals God as our loving heavenly Father who enters into a personal relationship with us.  God loves us, and this relationship of love cannot be terminated by death, just as God the Father’s love for Jesus did not end when Jesus died on the cross.

Jesus does not offer us a faith that answers every question our curiosity can propose.  Rather He gives us a faith by which to live and die.  When we die, we will find that Jesus has already gone before us, and is waiting for us.  He has prepared a place for us.

Meanwhile our task is to prepare for that great encounter with Christ Jesus, which will be our homecoming.  We prepare for it not by worrying about the details but by living to the full here and now.  Jesus has entrusted to His Church gifts – namely the Sacraments – to help us do just that.

“When we encounter Jesus at the end of life’s journey, will we be meeting a familiar and well-loved friend?  Or will he be a stranger at whose approach we shrink in fear?  The answer to that question lies in our hands, right now.  Out of his great love for us God permits us to choose what that great final encounter will be like.

It is the most important choice we what ever have.” (John Jay Hughes, Proclaiming the Good News:  Homilies for the ‘C’ Cycle, Huntington, IN:  Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. 1985, p. 255)