In these last weeks of the liturgical year, as we look forward to the great Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, which falls this year on November 24, the readings point us to the last things, to the end of this world and the beginning of the world to come.

You may remember that last week St. Paul cautioned us not to be alarmed by premature reports that the day of the Lord is at hand. The Lord will return to Earth in his own time. Next Sunday we’ll hear the same caution from Jesus himself, along with warnings about the wars and persecutions of the last days.

Today the readings focus on the article of faith that we confess in the Creed in the words “I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”

These astounding words utterly transform our perspective on one of life’s darkest and most impenetrable mysteries: the mystery of death.

What happens to us when we die has always been a mystery — and in all of human history no greater light has ever been shed on that mystery than the light shed by the foundational mystery of our Catholic faith: the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead on the first Easter Sunday.

The resurrection of Jesus changes everything. Just this past Easter Pope Francis called Jesus’ resurrection “the most shocking event in human history.” Which it is! The most shocking and the most important thing that’s ever happened.

It’s the foundational mystery of our faith. It’s why the Catholic Church exists. It’s why we come to Mass every Sunday — why we come to Mass at all, but also specifically why our holy day is no longer Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, but Sunday, the day of the Lord’s resurrection.

 

Resurrection and Jewish hope

The seven brothers in the first reading from 2 Maccabees being tortured to death by a wicked king named Antiochus Epiphanes faced their death without the light of Jesus’ resurrection, but still with faith in their own future resurrection. They died confessing their belief that there was nothing this king could do to them that the true King, the King of the world, Israel’s God, could not undo.

The king could kill their bodies, but God could raise them up to live forever. The king could cut off their hands and cut out their tongues, but God would make their bodies whole again — whole and immortal.

You see, their hope was not just that their bodies would die but their spirits would live on, but that God would raise up their bodies to immortal life.

This was the hope of many Jews in Jesus’ day, but not all, as we hear in today’s Gospel about the Sadducees.

We don’t hear so much in the New Testament about the Sadducees, but this doesn’t mean they weren’t important!

Jesus has a lot more to say about the Pharisees — mostly pretty harsh, although the Pharisees’ basic worldview was actually much closer to the teaching of Jesus than that of the Sadducees. St. Paul had been a Pharisee before his conversion when the resurrected Lord appeared to him on the road to Damascus.

But the Sadducees were an important, powerful Jewish sect. They were social elites, priests and aristocrats. The Pharisees weren’t so much the elites. They were more populists, popular moralists who emphasized moral and religious purity.

 

Answering the Sadducees from Moses

The Sadducees were religious minimalists. Their belief was based primarily on the five books of Moses, the Torah or Pentateuch: what Christians and Jews today count as the first five books of the Bible, and, for us, of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

These five books are foundational to Jewish faith — and Catholic faith — and the Sadducees read them and found no mention of resurrection (or spirits or angels), so they didn’t believe in those things. Their faith was focused on this world, not the next.

So this is why Jesus in the Gospel today answers the Sadducees from the books they accepted, the books of Moses.

Jesus basically says: “You Sadducees think when someone dies, they’re dead and gone. Wrong! Notice when God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, he didn’t say, ‘I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’ He said ‘I am their God!’ He’s still their God! So they’re not dead and gone.” Their spirits live, so the Sadducees are already wrong about that, since they don’t believe in spirits. And their bodies also will live again.

This was the hope of the Pharisees. Like Jesus, the Pharisees accepted not only the five books of Moses but also later prophets and writings that became part of the Jewish scriptures and our Old Testament. They also accepted oral tradition.

So they had a broader faith that included angels and spirits, and they looked forward to the resurrection of the dead, although it wasn’t necessarily clear exactly what that meant or how important it was.

 

Reincarnation and other false beliefs

So among the Jews there was some debate about the resurrection — but among the non-Jewish peoples of the ancient world — the Gentile nations, the ancient Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, and so on — there was no debate.

As far as they were concerned, once someone died, that was it: They weren’t coming back. Nobody comes back. (Not to stay. Someone might be visited by a ghost, but the visit is temporary; the ghost goes away again.)

What did they believe happens to you when you die? There were different ideas. Perhaps there was nothing after death. Perhaps it was unknowable. The spirit goes down into the underworld. Perhaps it forgets its life on earth. Or perhaps there’s some kind of reward or punishment in the life to come.

One false belief back then is still very popular today: reincarnation, the belief in past and future lives. Reincarnation and resurrection are opposite beliefs. Reincarnation means that the body is just a shell, and what lives on in the soul, reborn in one form after another until finally it’s pure enough to leave the physical world behind forever.

Look at our Lord hanging on the cross. His flesh is pierced; his blood flows. He suffers in his spirit for the sins of the world but also in his flesh. Already in the Garden of Gethsemane his agony was so great that he sweat drops of blood.

Does he suffer for the redemption of our souls? Yes. Only of our souls? No. Of our bodies also. And the tomb on Sunday morning was empty, just as all tombs will be one day. Every tomb in the cemetery outside this church … and your tomb, and mine.

 

The Four Last Things; purgatory; cremation

When we think about our destiny, as Catholics we think about the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell. This is something we drill our CCD students in: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell: the Four Last Things.

And of course there’s also purgatory, which isn’t one of the Four Last Things because it’s not final. Everyone in purgatory is on their way to heaven, aided of course by our prayers, by the prayers of the saints in heaven, and by the merits of our Lord’s Paschal Mystery in the shedding of his blood on the cross, offered to God the Father in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

We offer Masses for our loved ones around the year, but particularly on anniversaries of their deaths, perhaps on birthdays, and especially during the month of November, the month of All Souls.

We also visit their graves to pray for them. Our faith requires that our loved ones be buried or interred, either in blessed soil in a cemetery or a mausoleum, to express and symbolize our faith in their future resurrection. The body is not an empty shell cast aside by the spirit. It’s like a seed planted in the hope of its rising to immortal life.

Traditionally the Church forbade cremation, which was associated with heathen religion and sub-Christian attitudes toward death and the body. Today, while the Church prefers traditional burial, it allows cremation, but the ashes must be treated with the same respect as the body. They must be interred in a sacred place.

We don’t scatter the ashes of our loved ones in a field or on the ocean! It’s not that the Lord can’t still raise them if we do, but our faith calls us to have a place reserved to remember, honor, and pray for them.

 

What we do (and don’t) mean by heaven (and hell)

So when we talk about heaven and hell, we have to be clear what we mean by that. When we think of heaven, often the first thing we think of is what Jesus called paradise when he said to the Good Thief at their crucifixion, “This day you will be with me in paradise.”

The body dies, and the soul goes to stand before God. That’s judgment.

For those who leave this world in the love of God, in the state of grace, God’s love and goodness are eternal joy and beatitude: Heaven.

For those who leave this world rejecting the love of God, in the state of mortal sin, there’s no joy they can take in God’s love. They have only the misery of separation from the goodness that he wants all to enjoy: Hell.

For those who die loving the Lord imperfectly, God’s love is joy and pain at once, until the imperfect passes away: Purgatory.

But all of this so far is apart from the body. If what we look forward to stops here, that’s something less than true Christian hope.

 

The popular idea of “heaven” vs. the new heavens and the new earth

Too often today when people talk about “heaven” they mean a purely spiritual destination where spirits float around with God in the clouds. That’s a sub-Christian hope. That “heaven” is not what we look forward to.

The Lord suffered and was raised to redeem our bodies as well as our souls. And not just for our bodies — for the whole of creation.

This world is passing away, just like our bodies. The sun will die. The universe will wind down. But this world will be remade, resurrected, like our bodies and for our bodies. New heavens and a new earth.

This is the hope in which we bury our loved ones and pray for them. This is the hope with which we face our own death.

This is what we look forward to.