The end(s) of death

All Souls: Wis 3.1-9; Romans 6.3-9; John 6.37-40
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Serra Club Mass

Nothing created can haunt our dreams or peak our curiosity or awe our spirits with the same deep horror and dread as a single thought of death. Well beyond our immediate fears of pain or trauma—the mechanics of dying—there is that dark point of closing away a life: shutting off the lights of feeling, thinking, acting; the dimming eclipse of memory, intelligence, passion; that unknotting of a body-soul in death that frees us for our final flight to the Father. To surrender to our end, to yield our time (such a small portion to cling to!), to die—releasing, unburdening, freeing—is our last act of peaceful trust; this moment is the Must of our dying well: you will die. But how? Not “by what mechanical means”? But “by what grace, what gift”?

The souls of the just are in the hands of God and no torment shall touch them…they are at peace.

When the foolish look upon those who rest in the hand of God, the Book of Wisdom says, the dead seem dead; their passing from life to death looks to be an affliction, utter destruction. The foolish are not foolish because they fail to understand our best arguments for the immortality of the human soul. The foolish are not foolish because they cannot see beyond their methods, their labs, their experiments. Not even are the foolish foolish because they simply refuse to assent to the revelation of God. The foolish are foolish and believe and teach foolish notions because they will not trust the Lord; they will not to begin in His love and come to wisdom as a destination through love: “Those who trust in Him shall understand truth, and the faithful shall abide with Him in love…” The foolish will not trust; they will not abide in love, and so, the unknotting of the body and the soul in death can to them be nothing more than a disease, an affliction, some dread occasion to be avoided.

If the foolish “know” death to be a disease, utter destruction, what do we as the trusting family of the Father know about death? Paul reminds the Romans that long before our body-souls unknot, we are washed in the waters of baptism and in being so washed, we are also “baptized into [Christ’s] death.” My death will not be my own. Neither will yours. Our deaths will be Christ’s death. Indeed, “we were…buried with him through baptism into death…” But we were not baptized just to die. We were baptized into his death, buried with him, “so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.” What the foolish will not to see, not to trust in and therefore fail to understand is that “we have grown into union with him through a death like his, [so] we shall also be united with him in the resurrection.” That which leads the foolish to see death as disease is done away with: our slavery to sin. We are absolved and freed and brought to die not a natural death, but a Christ-like death, a death that can only bring us to live with him forever.

Jesus teaches the crowds: “Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and I will not reject anyone who comes to me…this is the will of the one who sent me, that I should raise [what has been given to me] on the last day.” For us to die then is not a matter of leaving life behind but a matter of coming to Christ in trust as the Father wills us. His gift to us is not necessarily a painless end, a joyful end, a quiet or even a celebratory end, but an end to Ending; that is, his gift to us is a death like Christ’s death, both a conclusion, a drawing closed and a start, a beginning again. Or, even better: death for us is our lives in Christ now extended into the Father’s perfect, glorious love. Jesus says that it is the will of his Father “that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may eternal life…” What disease, what affliction or trauma or grave misfortune can bring you in love to a life in Beauty and Truth? None can. Only the fool believes otherwise.

Remember the faces of your dead today, but do not mourn them. They are not here with us. They do not live in your hearts or in your photo albums or even in your most vivid memories. What is left of them for you here and now is merely a haunting, an afterimage, the thought of a ghost. Their immortality has nothing to do with hard won glory or infamy or trial. Like you and me, they were made for immortality, called to live beyond the death we live in the unknotting of body-soul. Their immortality, our immortality is the Father’s gift, a grace He gives to any of us who sees and hears His Son, believes in him, dies and is buried with him; anyone who nurtures holiness, avoids evil, spreads his gospel, does good work in his name, and trusts; anyone who stores up faith in the promises of the Father first and lives in Him, anyone who dies like Christ dies, Jesus says of him, “I shall raise him on the last day.” Today, children of God, is that last day. What then do you fear? What do you hope for beyond what God Himself as promised? His grace and mercy are with us, His holy ones.

Mimi Jaksic-Berger: Photo credit