must also say a decade of the rosary, go to
confession, buy me a book, and pray for the Holy Father's intentions. . .(whistling....)
HEY! We Dominicans used to get away with it all
the time. . .(sulking). . .I hate modernity. . .
(sulking. . . .)
"A [preacher] who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they are necessarily reflected in his [preaching]." — BXVI
Hat tip to Fr. Z. for pointing out this excellent piece by Fr. Michael Kerper. If, like me, you are a priest who would rather boil and eat America Magazine than read it, take the time to read this piece. If you are one of those priests who think America Magazine, Commonweal, and NCR(eporter) should be added to the biblical canon, pay attention to the highlighted parts of the article. Fr. Kerper is showing us what it means to serve in humility!
Fr. Michael Kerper
The old Missal’s rubrical micromanagement made me feel like a mere machine, devoid of personality; but, I wondered, is that really so bad? I actually felt liberated from a persistent need to perform, to engage, to be forever a friendly celebrant. When I saw a photo of the old Latin Mass in our local newspaper, I suddenly recognized the rite’s ingenious ability to shrink the priest. Shot from the choir loft, I was a mere speck of green, dwarfed by the high altar. The focal point was not the priest but the gathering of the people. And isn’t that a valid image of the church, the people of God?
A few posts down from this one, I ask regular readers to give me some serious feedback on my homilies. Since I firmly believe that the preacher preaches to himself first and that I've been feeling that my homilies have been somewhat BLAH lately, I thought it would be a good idea to hear from those of you who listen. Below is an exemplary critique from a former student of mine. This is what I'm looking for, folks!
I think you tend to sound more Protestant in your homilies with respect to delivery and style, or at least what my very narrow experience of Protestant preaching has been. Your content is, obviously, Catholic, but the mannerisms of speech can come across to me as a cross between a Baptist minister and a car salesman and like you're trying to be too clever. Now, a decent amount of the Protestant delivery feeling could be my Bostonian upbringing shining through and really more about northern vs. southern speech, but I think that there is a legitimate issue there as well. You sound every bit the academic that you are when you are speaking, and that's fine in general but sometimes it can result in sounding talked AT versus talked TO/WITH, particularly with the over-reliance on rhetorical devices. Answering your own questions to that degree (case in point: The Resurrection! So What?) can feel exclusive and condescending.
Jesus praises the widow in this gospel b/c she does not risk, plan, or weigh proportionate options when she drops her two coins into the collection box. She doesn’t offer a reasonable amount, a prudent portion given her income,. Nor does she weigh benefit against cost. She offers her whole livelihood. Jesus says, “I tell you truly, this poor widow put in more than all the rest.” How does Jesus reach this obviously erroneous conclusion? The widow gives freely, completely, without reservation out of her poverty, her lack. The others give of their surplus wealth. She has acquired the virtue—the good habit—of magnanimous sacrifice. The virtue that Jesus himself will practice by dying gratuitously on the cross at
We know the Scandal of the Passion and the Cross: Christ our King is whipped, ridiculed, and executed as a criminal by the Roman and Jewish authorities. This is a scandal because he has claimed again and again to be the Christ, the Anointed One of God, one who possesses divine power to heal, heavenly authority over demons, and the prestige of being the only Son of God. Power never yields to weakness. Authority never abdicates its place of honor, its elevated status.
There is another scandal here as well: the Scandal of Excessive Generosity. For creation to be redeemed, for all of God’s creation to be brought back into right relationship with its Creator, nothing more is strictly required than that the Creator bring us back. A simple act of divine will. SNAP! And we are back right where we were in
Jesus watches a widow drop two coins in the collection box, but in her he sees a kindred soul: one who gives not just a large portion of her wealth, not a calculated percentage of her leftover income but one who gives everything she has, her whole livelihood. And he sees in this widow a vision of his own sacrifice on the cross, his own excessively generous, needlessly gratuitous offering of body and blood for the reconciliation of creation to its Creator. It would have been more practical to leave Christ among us! To have skipped his suffering and death! But then, how would our Father have shown us His abundant love? His exceeding compassion?
Our faith is not an investment in risk-taking, planning, or prudently calculating cost/benefit. Our faith is a wildly generous, open-handed, open-hearted, full-throttled run, a redemptive marathon sprinted behind our Chosen Victim. We cannot give a portion of ourselves, a piece of our surplus wealth. We must give our whole livelihood, everything, all of it. . .nothing less was given for us.
Christ the King (C): 2 Sam 5.1-3;
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
We have two starkly opposed images of Christ the King: first born of all creation, head of the body, the Church AND the suffering servant, a ridiculed criminal nailed to a Roman cross. Savior and rebel. Messiah and rabble-rouser. Only Son of God and only a son of Joseph and Mary. He is the image of the invisible God and a convicted insurgent. He is the beginning, preeminent in all things and he is “King of the Jews,” sneered at and executed by the state. We know from Paul that the Son of God “took on the form of a slave, to be human like one of us,” and we know that he reigns in heaven at the right hand of the Father. The political question for us Christians, the leadership question for us is: How does a king rule while nailed to a cross?
Jesus hangs on the cross, nailed hands and feet to the wood. Pilate has placed a sign above Jesus’ head. It reads, “This is the King of the Jews.” The Roman soldiers, reading the sign, shout up at him, mocking him, “Hey, if you are King of the Jews, save yourself.” Without waiting for an answer, the soldiers give him vinegar to drink. More mocking, more scorn. For a Roman there is nothing more ignoble, more inhuman than to die a rebel, executed on a cross. It is the punishment reserved for lowest of the low. Their mocking of Christ is not only morally acceptable; it is required. It is part of the punishment. Stripping Jesus of his human dignity, stripping him of his identity, his vocation is just part of the price they make him pay for allegedly defying Roman rule. Nothing about Jesus’ teaching rises to the nobility and art of Roman philosophy. Nothing he did—heal the sick, forgive the sinner, feed the hungry—nothing about his ministry strikes the Romans as particularly religious or moral. Why save the weak from disease? Why rescue the poor from their fate? Why look with favor on slaves, foreigners, atheists, and cowards? Honor the gods, your family and ancestors, your country, and show no mercy to your enemies. The soldiers’ taunt—“Save yourself if you are King!”—is a spiteful but nonetheless predictable display of Roman disdain for weakness.
Given all of this, how does Christ rule from his cross? One thief, hanging next to our Lord on a cross of his own, says to Jesus, reviling him, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us.” The other thief, hanging on his cross on the other side, says, “Have you no fear of God. . .we are guilty of our crimes and we have received a just punishment but this man has done nothing criminal.” This thief admits his guilt and asks Christ for mercy. He receives it. Jesus says to him, “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in
Let’s ask our question one more time: how does a king rule while nailed to a cross? The weakest answer we could muster is: he rules by example. So did the Romans. We could say that he rules by moral force. Well, so did the Romans. They ruled by what they thought of as a moral order, an imperial imperative to bring the Pax Romana to the world. We could answer: he rules by invoking in us a kind of patriotic fervor for the Church. How dare the Romans and the Jews kill Christ! They must pay for their blasphemy! Is hatred and revenge our destiny as Christians? If not by example or moral imperative or an incitement of righteous vengeance, how then does Christ the King rule while nailed to a cross? How does he rule even now? We cannot forget that our suffering servant, our broken and bleeding Jesus is the one who delivered us from the power of darkness; gave us to his Father’s kingdom as sons and daughters, heirs to the wealth of eternity; in him we have our redemption, the forgiveness of our sins. He is more than merciful; he is Mercy. He is more than loving, he is Love.
Paul reminds us and we cannot forget: “…in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible…all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Christ the Crucified rules from his cross because in him “all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him…” Christ for us is everything. There can for us be no appeal to economic efficiency, political expediency, popular demand, or incremental progress. Christ rules by transforming cold hearts, by turning hard heads, by overthrowing obstinate wills; he rules in virtue, in strength, by being for us weak in condemnation and mighty in compassion. And we, as his body, his members can be nothing less, nothing weaker. We are subjects of a Crucified King.
Here we are, Lord, your bone and your flesh. Make of us mighty slaves, strong servants; make of us virtuous rebels, holy insurgents. Make of us a compassionate nation, a merciful tribe; make us a sacred people, a church bought by the blood of the cross and given away, freely given as a gift to the world.
We would need several days and lots of good, strong Starbucks coffee (or several bottles of good bourbon!) to work our way through the biblical, philosophical, theological history of and all the nuances of what it means for us to be raised from the dead as a body in the flesh. Dogmatically, we know this will happen. What will this resurrection look like? I mean, with camcorder in hand and a crystal clear digital mpeg file to review later, what would a person rising from the dead actually look like? We have no idea. Well, that’s not entirely true. It would look like Jesus’ vacating his Good Friday tomb, but do we really know what that looked like? No. We only know that the tomb was empty on Easter morning. Nothing remained of our Lord but his burial garments and the inferno of faith possessed by those who spread the Good News of his departure. We know this: without the resurrection of Christ from the dead as a body in the flesh, there is no resurrection of his Body, the Church. We remain in the grave, dead and decomposing. We thrive then on the hope of our resurrection; that is, we prosper, abundantly flourish on the sure knowledge that just as we have died with Christ, risen with Christ, and lived with him to become Christ for others, our hope is that we will rise again with him on the last day.
So what? Good question. Here’s another good question: do you live right now “as if” you were already resurrected? Are you a glorified person? One who is radiant with the glory of God? Are you an indisputable sign of Christ’s coming, his death, and his rising from the dead? We can argue endlessly about the physics and metaphysics of our resurrection, but the point for us now, this morning, is take seriously, deadly seriously, how we live these gifted-hours as women and men who accept the Lord’s promise of eternal life. Are you living an eternal life now? Dependent on God’s generosity? Loosed from the bonds of rebellious passion? Freed from the death of sin? Are you a child of the living God, the One for Whom “all are alive”? If not, then you will end your gifted-days with King Antiochus, crying on your death-bed, “I know that this is why these evils have overtaken me; and now I am dying in a foreign land bitterly grieved.”
Matthew reports that Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” We would expect this question and its subsequent answer to lead Jesus to teach his friends and students the nature of the Son of God and
Peter, in his first letter, writes to his fellow priests, as a “witness of the sufferings of Christ,” that they, his priestly co-workers, must be exemplary shepherds, tending God’s flock “willingly” not by constraint, “not for shameful profit but eagerly” as God Himself desires it. In other words, priestly authority must be wielded FOR the people and not against the people; for the truth and beauty of the faith and not for personal wealth or power, for public celebrity, overblown ego, or career advancement. The scandal of authority raises its ugly, lying head most dangerously in clerical narcissism—the use and abuse of the gifted-keys for MY glory, for MY elevation, for MY Self, bloated and callous, hungering after attention and fame. Priestly authority, used for this purpose, will divide the church, destroy the preaching, deny God’s people the truth of their faith, and ultimately, kill the spirit of both the shepherd and his flock. Our own “crisis of authority” is less about the failure of the Father’s good sheep to obey (the failure to listen) but more about the failure of our shepherds to lead in the way that “God would have it.”
How would God have His priests and bishops lead? Peter’s answer, “You are the Christ…” does not lead Jesus to expound a theology of the Messiah. Peter’s answer, “You are the Son of the living God” leads Jesus to appoint Peter to the office of vicar, steward of the kingdom, Rock for the church! Peter and his co-workers draw the fresh water of ecclesial authority from a deeply seeded trust, a root system of flourishing faith and love, and they branch out, across the church and the world, to speak the Word, to teach and preach The Truth that liberates. It is out of the deep well of abiding love for Christ and his people that any priest, any bishop draws the power to announce the Good News, to admonish and correct error, to set right those wandering away from the beaten path of our ancestors in faith. For a priest or bishop to use that well to slake a thirst for power, for fame or glory, or to puff up a failing ego is to drink his own destruction. And what is more scandalous for legitimate authority, what could throw on the path of the Way a stone larger than one of Christ’s apostles self-destructing before the eyes of the world?
Peter, the Rock, admonishes his priestly co-workers, “Do not lord [your authority] over those assigned to you, but be examples to the flock.” Show them Christ and they in return will show you redeeming love.
It was a Friday afternoon after school. We were right outside the Ms Shear’s house—she was the one with the indoor pool with that the glass roof. She would open her gates and let us run our bikes down her driveway into the dead-end cove. At the bottom of the driveway that Friday just as I was spinning around to ride back up, my best friend, Teddie asked me, “Do you know Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior?” I stared at him for a second, mildly embarrassed, murmured something unintelligible, and headed back up the hill. He followed and asked me at the top, “Have you ever heard of the Tribulation?” No. “The Second Coming of Jesus.” No. “The Rapture?” No. “The war at Armageddon?” No. He stared at me, open-mouthed. I felt like a circus-freak, an dime-store exhibit, one of those werewolf boys or eight-legged cows you see at the state fair. And just as I was starting to think Teddie was going to slap a sign on me and start selling tickets, he said, “You need to come to
Jesus knows how to get and hold the attention of a crowd. Pointing to the temple, the very heart of the Jewish people, he says, “All that you see here—the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone…” And the people wonder, “Teacher, when will this happen?” Notice how Jesus answers. Typically, Jesus doesn’t answer the question asked of him; rather, he answers the question we would ask if we were less clueless! Rather than tell the crowd who or what destroys the temple, or how the temple is destroyed, or even when it is pulled down, Jesus says, “See that you are not deceived, for many will come in my name, saying ‘I am he’ and ‘The time is come.’ Do not follow them!” This isn’t an answer. And neither is any of the rest of his response. War. Famine. Earthquakes. Awesome sights and mighty signs. Persecutions of the church. These have been going on since the beginning of the Church. Before the Church even. And long after her founding. And not only that, but the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans some seventy years after the resurrection of Christ, making this passage from Luke’s gospel essentially an interesting but ultimately pointless historical curiosity for us in 2007, right? Wrong! Jesus’ response to the crowd is an answer to the ages. To us. He is speaking to us right now.
You see, our faith, done right, is a dangerous thing. It is a worm in the shiny apple of the world. A pest that buzzes ‘round the emperor’s head. Our faith is a still small voice that never stops whispering for the Lord’s justice. Never stops praying for the world’s sick, hungry, lonely, oppressed, sinful. Our faith, our firm trust in the Lord and our sure hope of resurrection, annoys; it burns to clean; it names those who would set themselves on the altar of the temple, and it pulls down the idols of the stomach. Through our faith we see clearly, hear cleanly the chaos and racket of a world infused with the spirit of the Now and the New. Easy salvation. Cheap grace.
Do not be deceived. Do not follow him. Or her. Or it—a spiritual program, a method, a style or a fashion, a theological trend, or a “new thing in prayer,” the latest thing to demand your allegiance, your time and energy, your soul. Do not be deceived by easy fixes, quick cures, elaborate models of living the faith, or fanciful devotions that take your eyes from Christ. Do not be deceived by the shiny, flickering world of cable-TV commerce or media-born politics or the brain-rotting candy of cultural relativism. Your faith is old. Your trust in the Lord is sparkling new. For us, Christ is the wisdom of the ages. Always fresh, always innovative, always the original.
So, Jesus-stupid-Philip went to
Jesus warns us that we will be persecuted. Arrested and executed for our faith. This was made clear to me by Teddie when he showed me the chaos of the apocalypse. The energy, the fervor of his belief propelled me to seek out, to question, to look more deeply into the faith. I didn’t stop at the fundamentalist vision of the end times. I kept reading, praying, asking questions. And I found the Church…eventually. Before that though I let every alien philosophy out there, every puny little god with a creed and a priest tell me how to live. We are the Church, the Body of Christ. We are his Body and Blood. The blood of the martyrs’ faith. The faith of our ancestors in covenant with the Father. And a Father who has not abandoned us to novelty, to trendy religious nonsense. We are given the word of wisdom against whom no adversary can stand. We are given the trust of the Creator and His recreating Love. On these, we endure. With these, we persevere. And what promise we do have? This one: “You will be hated b/c of my name, but not a hair on your head will be destroyed.” Nothing cheap or easy about that!
But women's ordained ministry, even on its own terms, has been an undeniable flop. Putting aside the fact, enunciated by Catholic doctrine, that sacramental priesthood is void for women, one might still expect that the opportunities provided by non-sacramental ministries would have thrown up someone of substance -- or at least lasting influence -- over the past couple decades. Yet we find no Margaret Thatchers and no Hannah Arendts and no Jeanne Kirkpatricks among the clergy but, in their place, a inordinately high number of women who are just plain daft.
[. . .]
The flakiness of women ministers is a flakiness with a characteristic edge to it. It flirts with paganism and expresses itself with a facetious worldliness. I suspect this is partly due to the fact that the churches that ordain women are pro-abortion, which means the whole spiritual dimension of maternity must be amputated. The glint of the new-sharpened knife is never far from their feminism. And as if by compensation for this ideologically obedient cruelty, the same persons often display a quasi-pagan sentimentalism about nature. Katharine Jefferts Schori, we're told, dresses like a sunrise, and many other priestesses cultivate a rapturous 'wind in the face' emotivism that takes the place orthodox Christian liturgy gives to the worship of God."
The Apostles say to the Lord, “Increase our faith.” I’m sure Jesus smiles a little at this and probably thinks to himself, “Oh really? Increase your faith? Are you really asking me to expand your capacity for trusting in our Father’s promises? Really, now? Think about this for a moment: the larger your capacity for faith—the more faith I give you—the more faith you will be required to cooperate with. More faith, more work. More faith, more trust! More letting go, more just letting be.” Instead of all that, Jesus tells his apostles this: “If your faith is just the size of a mustard seed, you can uproot the mulberry tree with a word and replant it in the sea. Knowing that, do you really want more faith? Remember what I said about faith and moving mountains? You guys are having trouble with simple stuff like not putting stumbling blocks in front of one another and forgiving one another’s offenses. You want to uproot mulberry trees and replant them in the sea? And move mountains too? Tell ya what! You find a better way to put the faith I’ve given you to good use and then we’ll talk about more faith. Deal?”
Deal! Without becoming too much the cultural theorist/critic here, let me suggest a way of taking the faith we have and sharpening it like a fine-edged sword for forgiveness. Our culture, our American milieu, and we Americans thrive with a kind of Extended Wounded Ego—a sore psyche that pokes out there like a delicate nose, sniffing out offense…like French pigs rooting for truffles! How easily we are offended. How simple it is for us to be sinned against. Our eccentricities, weirdnesses, preferences, odd-ball opinions and fantasies—everything I think is essential to my ME-ness becomes an overripe fruit, too sweet, too tender, so soft and ready to be bruised by the slightest chiding touch, the most subtle word of the kind reprove that I spiral into sputtering indignation and collapse into a weeping heap. Am I exaggerating? Yea, just a little to make a point. And here’s my point: if faith requires you to tell me that I have sinned and then requires me to repent and then requires you to forgive me no matter how many times I sin…how much sharper will your faith become if you willed NOT to be offended, willed not to be sinned against? In other words, your daily work with the trust God has already given you becomes the work of building that sort of spiritual life where the sore, offensible, easily bruised ME-ness of You is emptied out, poured out like a libation (Paul says) and all that emptied space in your heart is made ready for a Larger Christ, a Bigger Jesus! How difficult is that? Very difficult. But also very necessary. Love requires it of us. . .and makes it possible.
Struggle with this: the grasp of your love is limited only by the reach of your trust in God’s promise of mercy to you. How far will His promise reach to grasp you? All the way to the cross…and back.
Without knowing it most of you are religious Platonists when it comes to what you believe about your death and your life after death. I am willing to bet that most of you believe that you are your soul; that is, who you are as a person is best described as “my soul.” My soul is who I am. And I bet that most of you believe that when you die your soul is separated from your body and your body goes into the ground and your soul travels to heaven (or to purgatory or hell). Most of you believe that eternal life is a life lived for a really long time as a spiritual entity, some sort of indestructible ghost. Immortality then is the promise of living forever as a spirit, a soul without a body, a ghost without its machine.
This false notion is the root of our sometimes obsessive disdain for the body while we are alive here on earth. Religious Platonists believe we must temper the body in order to exalt the soul. The body is a trap, a cave, an anchor holding the pure spirit down, weighing down our mournful souls who want nothing more than to be free of the flesh and soaring unimpeded back to God who is pure spirit, pure soul. How often do you lament the weaknesses of your body? How often you do attribute your sinfulness to a tempted body, your flesh enticed and conquered by the flashy but ultimately empty promises of passing disobedience? Wouldn’t we all be better Christians, more pure, just better people in general, if we did not have to contend with the appetites of these smelly, disease-prone, slowly dying and decaying bodies?
If you think this Platonism is limited to Christians, think again. Our materialist culture holds to a rather perverse version of this heresy. Being happy is about controlling the body. Diets. Exercise. Plastic surgeries. Props, potions, pills, powders, ointments, lotions, gels, needles, patches—a whole pharmacology of chemical mixtures designed to give us control of the body b/c we believe that absolute control of the body is the key to our happiness. If you think the religious zealot is hateful to the spiritually indifferent or to those who actively reject his belief, just try to talk to a true Gym Bunny or a Gym Jock. Their utter distain for your physical weakness, your lack of motivation, your ill-defined abs and flabby butt, their venomous contempt for your high calorie, high fat diet and your ignorance of proper supplementation—all of these combine in a heart so spiritually pure in its hatred for the body that these Gym Bunnies and Jocks would scare the dungeon masters of the Spanish Inquisition with their zealotry! Make no mistake: their torturous routines on those robotic machines are not about loving the flesh…no, no, the flesh must be denied, tamed, shaped, and beaten into submission. And who or what is it that must conquer these mushy muscles? The will. The wanting. The desire. Yes, yes. It is the soul. Thank God we are Christians and not Religious Platonists!
Jesus is confronted by a party of Jewish philosophers and theologians known as the Sadducees. This group of highly educated men reject the recent developments of Jewish religious thought and argue vehemently against the resurrection of the body after death. Jesus and the Pharisees, appealing more to the common people and accepting recent theological progress, preach and teach the resurrection of the dead. The question posed to Jesus about the woman with multiple marriages is designed to expose the trendy teaching on the resurrection of the dead as scripturally unsound. Think of the question as a sort of “what if” problem. The Sadducees think that Jesus is going to have to answer them in one of two ways: 1) either deny the resurrection and say that the woman is not married to all those men simultaneously or 2) affirm the resurrection and say that she is married to them all at the same time. Either way the Sadducees are proven correct in their rejection of the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Jesus, being Jesus and no one’s fool, does the unexpected. He affirms the resurrection and denies that the woman is married to seven men at the same time. How? Death marks the end of this life. The resurrection is the sure sign of new life. Those who are resurrected no longer marry nor do they die. In other words, a marriage is ended at death. Once we are dead and come to see the Lord face-to-face, we no longer need sacraments as external signs of His presence and grace. We are His presence and grace!
So, what is the resurrection of the dead? Or, as the Apostles’ Creed puts it “the resurrection of the body”? If you are not just your soul but your body AND your soul, then for You to share in the divine life, for You to partake of the divine nature in heaven, You must be You, that is, your soul AND your body, whole and entire, the complete person, the completed You. Our God is the God of the living not the dead “because to Him all are alive.” With the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ, we too are made worthy to suffer, die, and rise with him. Just as he was given a body glorified and transfigured, so will we. Just as he was lifted into heaven, so will we. Just as Moses called “Lord” and just as Christ cried out “Lord,” so we too shout out “Lord!” Knowing that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Lord of Lord, and King of Kings is the God of the living—those who live always under His dominion!
If any of this is true for us, then we have to think carefully about how we live now. What is the moral theology of living now as dead folks who will live in transfigured glory? In other words, what does it mean for you right now to be a man or woman or child who has died with Christ in baptism, risen again to his eat and drink at his altar, and now live renewed until your natural death to rise again with him body and soul? It means we wait in joyful hope for the coming of the Lord—praying, fasting, believing, daily, hourly; working, sleeping, eating, daily, hourly; dressing, loving, feeding the hungry, daily, hourly; healing, forgiving, listening to the Word; daily, hourly waiting, waiting, waiting on the coming of the Lord; doing daily, hourly what Christ has given us to do as if we were with him now because we ARE with him now. We are with his Body now doing what we the Body of Christ does: offering to our Father thanks and praise for the gift He made of Himself to us. Our God is the God of the living not the dead because for Him we are all, always living, always alive in the Spirit that is life everlasting!