2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14 | 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5 | Luke 20:27-38

Almighty and merciful God, graciously keep from us all adversity so that unhindered in mind and body alike we may pursue in freedom of heart the things that are yours.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

YOU’RE not supposed to discuss politics or religion at dinner parties.  At least that’s what they say, but when I’m at a dinner party, the conversation often goes to religion.  If we ever get on the topic of today’s liturgy of the word, when we talk about life after death, it’s amazing how people’s image of that whole issue of what happens when we die is so different.  You can be a Catholic forever, and I know many Catholics who have this kind of fear of death with this sense that, “I just don’t know if I’m good enough.  I don’t know if I’m going to make it to the next world.  I worry about punishment.”  Because Catholics, like those of many religions, we had a very strong dose — not so much today, but I’m past my mid-70s, so I remember when I was a child — of what was the biggest thing that seemed to be placed before our imagination, and that was, if you didn’t do the right thing, you would burn in hell forever, and it was imprinted in my mind.  So I always had this fear that I wasn’t going to own up to what I should be, because the model that I was given so often in homilies was the model of Jesus.  “We must be like Jesus.  We must be like him.”  Somehow I wish they’d have told me that Jesus lives in me, and I need to rely upon him to move through me rather than me trying to become like him, but that came later in my spiritual life, thank God.  But it’s interesting to me that many people you talk to just say, “Well, I don’t think there’s really anything afterwards.  I think, when I cease to live, I just cease to exist.  I go back to pure energy and become part of the cosmos or whatever.”  I just find it fascinating that we all have such different views.

I’m wondering, what does it reflect?  Does it really reflect the notion of what’s going to happen after death?  We don’t know much about it.  We haven’t experienced it.  We have lots of people, today more than ever, who have near-death experiences when they have this kind of universal sense that, when they die, they go to a place, and it feels good.  And they often disassociate, and they see their bodies maybe on the operating table.  And then somehow their doctors bring them back to life, and their spirit goes back into their bodies.  And then they find themselves like, “Oh, shoot, I’m back.”  Interesting.  

I think it’s fascinating that Scripture has a really interesting history of this whole notion of   life after death, and one of the things that’s interesting is the first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah.  And the Sadducees were the people who really were the conservative rabbis, the conservative teachers. They only believed in the first five books of the Bible.  Everything after that didn’t seem that important, but there’s nothing in those first five books of the Bible that say anything about life after death.  It’s more about living a good life, a rich life, a full life here, and maybe that was what needed to be said first. You could see how easy it could be for a religion to sort of ignore this life if all of its attention was placed on the after-life. So it makes sense that maybe as God began his revelation — and you have to realize, the beauty of the Old Testament is this wonderful 1,000-plus years of the story of God revealing who he is and teaching us who we are. There’s an evolution of understanding in terms of the teaching coming in stages.  It didn’t start with the fullness of the message.  In the beginning, it was mostly God revealing himself as the God who is, the only God who is, the primary God, or monotheism. And this God had a love for his people and wanted them to live according to a law, a rule that he would share with them.  It was his law.  That was his wisdom, his gift.  The law was everything, and so that’s the way it began.  And slowly we see it creeping into the Old Testament stories and then most especially into the New Testament. But this questioning of what happens afterward, and every now and then, you get a clear indication early on in the Old Testament of what was to come into fullness in the New Testament, which is that there is a life after death. And the suffering we go through in this life doesn’t begin to compare with the gifts we have.

So we have this unique story in 2 Maccabees.  These seven brothers and this woman, their mother, had this insight into the fact that no matter what a human being does to me, whatever he tries to take from me, if he even takes my body or takes my tongue or takes my body limbs off, that’s fine, because I get everything back.  Everything’s going to work out.  I am going to be safe. You can’t destroy me, and that to me is one of the most interesting aspects of the story of life after death.  When you have that as a part of your imagination of who you are, and how God works, there is a kind of sense that, when you are overwhelmed by pain and suffering in this life, or if you get discouraged that your life hasn’t turned out the way it’s supposed to, there is this promise that no matter how difficult this life is or how easy or hard it is, there is this promise of something absolutely full is coming for us. It could be described as simply a deep conviction that there’s nothing in this world that can destroy me, nothing. It can take my physical life, but it can’t destroy me — one of the most interesting, core teachings that God longs for his people to know about who God is.  “I will never ever let anyone destroy you. You are safe.” It’s interesting then that this core issue we need to have in our relationship with God is tied up in the way we imagine life after death.  

Now, the other thing that I find fascinating in this set of readings, when it talks about life after death, is the story of Jesus and the Sadducees. The Sadducees were the conservative group that stuck only to the Torah, and they really did not believe in the resurrection, which in a sense has something maybe subtle to do with the fact they didn’t believe that somehow out of pain and suffering something good could come. And so when they argued with Jesus over the issue, you can see something in their questioning that is a little simple, I guess you’d say. They take the words of Scripture so literally.  It’s like a lot of fundamentalists who are wonderful people, but many times they take the word so literally that, when the word they understand, what they understand the word to mean, they try to apply it to the mysteries of the universe and the mystery of God’s working with us and his love, and it doesn’t fit.  And so they say, “Well, it can’t be true.”  So it’s a really almost humorous story to me when they come and they say, “Look, if you’re talking about life after death and people are going to be together after death, what about the relationships that people have? Here’s a woman who ends up marrying seven different men, and each man died, and he died childless.  So her job was to marry the next brother and to try to make a baby, and then she died.”  The joke we always tell is the reason she died was she found out there was an eighth brother.  And now she died, and so the question is — they’re saying, “Whose wife is she going to be?”  This is a real problem, because they imagine that life after death is, in the most literal sense, that we would just continue to live, and if we’re living there, we would have to continue to procreate, and so they saw this big problem. And Jesus' answer is caring. It’s sympathetic. It understands what’s going on, but he’s saying, “Look, you don’t understand.  When people die, they’re not going to be just the same.  They’re not going to have their bodies in exactly the same way.”  Jesus is trying to open up to a mystery.  They’re going to be like angels — angels.  

All major religions have angels.  They know there is such a thing as a spiritual being that doesn’t have a body, that can move from heaven to the earth.  They believe that angels can take human form, and they have this wonderful role of taking care of people.  They’re like messengers from God to human beings, and they’re always there next to us taking care of us.  And if you’re Catholic, you remember always that you have a guardian angel at your side.  He’s going to take care of you.  It’s a beautiful image of comfort from a spiritual being, and so Jesus is trying to say, “Look, this is something that goes way beyond the way you are imagining the spiritual realm.”  So they really weren’t that grounded in spirituality, but then you look at the Old Testament as it moves all the way from Abraham to the resurrected life of Jesus. There’s a wonderful, slow, beautiful, evolution of teaching as every teaching builds on the one before.  So the Old Testament is essential to understanding the New Testament, and you have this image that finally comes to mind when you realize that Jesus, when he has lost everything, suffered everything, believes deep in his heart that this is all about something that had to be the way it is. It had to be written this way, and he knew that somehow he would move on to something. He had that sense, and then when he gave up everything freely with the expectation that there was something more for him, he became a resurrected body.  And almost to underscore the reality of what life after death is like, he spent 40 days walking the earth as a spirit that we all become after we die, able to move, able to teach, able to continue.

When I was growing up, I’d go to funerals as a Catholic, and I’d go to other funerals for friends who weren’t Catholic, and it seemed like the theme of the homily was always to talk about good — the sermon was how good the man was, especially if it was not a Catholic service, because it seems as if the Catholics were urged not to talk about the person so much as to talk about the mystery of death. In either case, I always used to hear something like, “Well, he’s gone, and we’re separated, and one day soon, when we die, we’ll go back and meet them.” And in my mind, I had this image of, “Oh, shoot,” when they die, you lose contact, and then you have to wait 'til you die, and then you see them, and you fill them in on all the things that have happened.  “So and so did this.  So and so did that, and then this happened.”  Remember people saying, when a woman dies young, that’s so sad, and she has three daughters. She’ll never see her daughters’ graduation, her daughters’ weddings, like death is a separation completely from this world. Well, then why would Jesus have said, “When you die, you become like an angel”?  Angels are anything but separated from this world.  They’re the ones most engaged in this world.  

So what I’ve changed dramatically, because I used to preach that way: that he’s gone. We’ll see him someday. Now I believe, when I think about the community of saints, that wonderful thing we have in our church when we believe we can call upon a holy person who lived centuries ago, and ask him to intercede for us to God, he will do that. How can they possibly listen to five billion people who might be praying to St. Anthony because they lost their keys or whatever?  It’s like, “How does that happen?”  Well, they can if they do like the Sadducees did. “How can everybody talk to one person?”  It’s easy in the spiritual world.  It’s like we change.  We have to shift our way of imagining life into a new, beautiful, expansive view, and then what I believe we begin to see is something I believe the dead so long for us to understand. And that is, when they die, when they enter into the next world, they go through a period, perhaps, of purgation, purification in purgatory, but they’re on their journey to the fullness of heaven.  And in the process of that journey, they’re growing, and it strikes me that would be the time when they would be most anxious and interested in being in contact with us, maybe making up for the things they didn’t do when they were with us, wanting to guide us because of their deep love for us.  All those things are there, it seems, intuitively in a human heart that they would want to do, and it makes sense to me that we do it.  So believing in life after death has a lot to do with believing in a very real thing, that whatever struggles and problems we go through, whatever sense of separation, all those things are illusions, because they ultimately lead to greater union, greater oneness, greater joy.  What a beautiful thing to remember, that the dead are with us every day, loving us, encouraging us and being there as a spirit that was with them, and then we can continue to feel them.

Father, your death and resurrection opened our eyes to the greatest mystery that we are invited to participate in.  This is a mysterious transformation from a world that we know to a world so beyond our imagining, so full, so rich and so generously offered to all of us who long for it.  Bless us with a greater understanding of your mercy, your forgiveness, your desire for us to always live with you and with one another forever, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.