It is the conversation that every parent dreads, and yet no parent is able indefinitely to avoid: “Where’s grandma?” If the parent is a Christian, the answer typically is “She’s in heaven,” or perhaps “She’s with Jesus.” “When is she coming home?” “She’s not coming home.” “Why not?” “She’s with God now. It was her time.” “Will we see her again?” “Yes, dear, someday.” “When?” “When we go to heaven to be with Jesus.”
These questions are uncomfortable, even for people of faith, for death is still an insurmountable mystery – the great divide, the journey from which no one (at least in our limited experience) has ever returned. How can we attempt to explain to children not only that which we know so little about ourselves, but that which we tenaciously devote a lifetime of resources, money and efforts of self-preservation to avoid?
But the search to find an explanation of or to make sense of death is as old as human self-awareness itself. Each culture, every society, every human community that ever existed has attempted to provide answers. The funerary rites of many civilizations, both past and present, often provided for the comfort of the dead through gifts of worldly goods, and even caches of food and drink, to make the journey into the afterlife less arduous or perhaps more enjoyable once the dearly departed arrived at their final destination. Many ancient monuments, many of the great ancient wonders of the world (e.g. the Pyramids of Giza, or the Necropolis of China’s First Emperor), were built in the attempt to make sense of the mystery death.
Christians are not immune from devising our own images of death to cope with mortality. We imagine St. Peter standing at the pearly gates admitting the worthy into heaven (or else sending the unworthy to that “other place”); each disembodied soul occupying his/her own cloud; earning our angel wings, and receiving halos. In the West, especially since the time of Augustine, speculation on what happens to the soul after death led to the development of the doctrine of purgatory, and eventually to the abuse of that doctrine in the sale of indulgences, which was one of the presenting causes of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century.
Many of these images seem so natural, so much a part of our popular belief, that we automatically assume that the Bible’s pages are filled with descriptions of disembodied, winged and haloed saints; of the pearly gates of heaven and streets of gold. But, in fact, the Bible has very little to say about the immediate experience of death or what theologians like to call the “intermediate state” between the death and the resurrection. Do not misunderstand me, the Bible has plenty to say about death. One of the most important biblical stories (Adam and Eve) tells us how death entered the human condition, revealing death as a curse. But the Bible says surprisingly little about what it is like to experience death, or of what happens to the soul immediately after death.
However, this does not mean that the Christian faith is devoid of any satisfying answers. For this is where biblical faith – the faith of the Church – stands apart from all other kinds of faith. While most religions prepare their adherents for death, the Bible’s testimony and focus is on LIFE. Jesus did not say, “He who hears my word and believes the one who sent me will have a pleasant afterlife; or will reach Nirvana,” but rather, “He who hears my word and believes in the one who sent me will have eternal life.” The whole focus of the Bible is on LIFE not death.
This is precisely why the doctrine of the resurrection, and consequently the Church’s belief that Christ was raised from the dead, is a non-negotiable of the Christian faith, even if there is much about the resurrection that is still a mystery to us. This morning’s Gospel, the account of the raising of Lazarus, affirms both the tragedy of death and the hope of the resurrection. Jesus weeps; he is greatly distressed – not merely because his friends, Mary and Martha, have lost their brother; but because death is a tragedy. Death is not intended to be our destiny. But then Jesus commands that the stone that closed off Lazarus’ tomb be rolled away, even though he had been in the tomb for four days: “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” he says to Martha. He then calls forth Lazarus from the grave; because Lazarus, the friend of Jesus, is called to life, not to death.
St. John’s vision in the Book of Revelation expresses the same truth in this way: I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. A new heaven and a new earth, just as there is a “new Jerusalem” – the Church of God.
LIFE, full-bodied LIFE, not some kind of ethereal, disembodied “after-life” is the description that the Bible provides us, and what we as Christians believe is the destiny of every child of God. And with this knowledge, and the power that lies behind the knowledge of our appointed destiny of life, the Christian cannot help but be transformed even in this present life. As St. Paul says: “Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
It turns out then that we as Christians have much to hope in; for we have the ultimate answer to our great adversary, death – the victory over death that we have in the One who died for us, and was raised again on the third day – not only for ourselves, but for those who have gone on before us (our loved ones, our friends, our parents, grandparents, etc.) – ALL THE SAINTS. When we remember them, when we pray for them, when we recall their godly examples and influence on our lives – we are not invoking mere memories; nor are we simply calling up spirits from the dead. Rather we are celebrating with them – in a real way – the life that both we and they NOW HAVE in Christ. For the promise of Christ is as true for those who precede us in physical death as it is for those who tarry still on earth – for what we do here at the altar of our church, and what each community of Christians throughout the world does each time they gather for worship, is joined together with the worship all who have died in the knowledge of God and of the Lamb, who stand before his throne night and day; where we are numbered with them as a multitude that no one can count, from every nation, every tribe, every people and every language; where we join with ALL the SAINTS in the cry: “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
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