For the last few weeks, we’ve been hearing at Sunday Mass little bits of St Paul’s explanation of the Christian view of life after death, as it appears in the 15th Chapter of his 1st Letter to the Corinthians. You can see and hear me giving this Homily on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFSe7V3DKnw
Today, we reach his great Finale where he proclaims, “Death where is your victory? Death where is your sting” (1 Cor 15:54-58) Sadly, the power of that proclamation is rather lost on us today, because most people tend to simply assume that there is some kind of life after death, although what that “life” is like varies from person to person. I’ve even met people who believe in life after death, even though they don’t believe in God, which seems extraordinary to me, but that is what they say! So, if some kind of life after death is more or less automatic, then there is no death to defeat and no victory to be won for us by Christ.
It is easy to get muddled here, because the Church expresses belief in life after death in terms of our immortal soul that will either face everlasting death in hell or more hopefully eternal life with God. However, in St Paul’s time, most non-Jews did not believe in the existence of an immortal soul or in anything much after death, and indeed even for Jews there were some who did and some who didn’t. For pagans, non-Jews, the only person who gained life after death was the Emperor, the Caesar, and he did so by becoming a god, whilst for the rest there was nothing that could really be called “life.” St Paul therefore uses different imagery to challenge this view amongst the many pagans who were becoming Christians. So we heard him say very firmly in our Reading two weeks ago, that “If Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins. And what is more serious, all who have died in Christ have perished.” (1 Cor 15:16-20) Thus he was teaching them and us that the death and resurrection of Jesus was not just a nice inspiring story, but an event that affects all those who in one way or another put their trust in him. We are given eternal life because of Jesus, not because of some automatic right that we get because we are humans; and that eternal life is not something vague; rather it is about living a new life in union with God. As St Paul wrote earlier in this Letter (1 Cor 13:12) “Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face. The knowledge that I have now is imperfect; but then I shall know as fully as I am known.” St Peter makes the same point in a different way, reflecting the Roman idea that to have eternal life means to be god-like, and thus he tells us that Christians after death will be “Partakers of the divine nature.” (2 Peter 1:4)
Both these texts make clear, that what will happen to us when we die will be a transformation from what we are like now, as flesh and blood humans, into something where, as St John says, we will “Be like God, for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2) This reminds us that although we are made in the image of God, and can therefore sense within us at our best, something of what God is like, hence St John says “God is love and those who live in love, live in God and God lives in them,” (1 John 4:16) we are nonetheless very very different from God. Remember what Jesus says to the Samaritan woman “God is spirit.” In other words, God is an invisible power who exists in a different dimension from us, outside space and time as we understand it. Thus God, as the risen Jesus, is one who as we hear in the 1st Letter to Timothy “alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see.” (1 Tim 6:16) And it is this risen Lord Jesus who takes us through his power from what we are like now, so distant from God, to what we will be like with God after our death.
Sadly, in the bits of 1 Corinthians 15 that we’ve been reading in the last few weeks, St Paul’s explanation of this transformation has been left out, for he too makes clear in a wonderful passage, (1 Cor 15: 35-52) of which our Reading today is a small part, what this change will be like. He compares it to a dry seed lying in the ground transformed into the plant that it becomes. He says “God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.” and then a little later “So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.” And it is then that we get our Reading today where he explains that we will be transformed into “A life-giving spirit”
So when people ask me what life after death is like, I have to say that it is completely impossible to explain. How can the seed understand what it is like to be a flower, or the caterpillar what it is like to be a butterfly? – and these are transformations taking place in the physical world. What we are being taught, in these great passages from the Bible, is of something infinitely greater, of a transformation from the physical world of space and time to a spiritual dimension where space and time do not exist. I mentioned earlier that I’ve met some people who believe in life after death but do not believe in God. It seems to me that what is wrong with their view may not be what life after death is like, but rather that they have been taught to think of God as some power within our physical universe, and therefore cannot link that to an existence in the future outside space and time.
The church expresses these truths in one of the Prayers the priest says at Funeral and Requiem Masses. “Lord, for your faithful people life is changed, not ended. When the body of our earthly dwelling lies in death, we gain an everlasting dwelling place in heaven.” But remember once again that “body” here does not mean our flesh and blood and bone, but our being, expressed now in physical form but capable of being transformed into something spiritual. It is this different use of the word “body” that has led to some people getting confused into thinking that in life after death we will in some sense be like the bodies we are now. I fondly remember a dear devout old man who couldn’t understand how there would be room for us all in heaven, and I had to explain to him again and again that the “bodies” we have in heaven do not take up any space because they are spiritual bodies, and that anyway heaven is not a place with boundaries but something so different from life now, that it is beyond our understanding. What is vital is that we realise, that whatever it is like it is a gift from God, and not something we can ever take for granted.
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