November 2, All Souls’ Day
2 Maccabees 12:43‐45
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
John 11:17-27
‘In nihil ab nihilo quam cito recidimus’ – ‘How quickly we fall back from nothing to nothing.’ These words are inscribed on an ancient gravestone from the Roman Empire. The person who carved these words into stone was convinced that death is the ultimate end, that death is a fall into nothingness.
We do not have to go back to ancient times to find people who hold this belief. It is still widespread today. A common way of dealing with it is to suppress any thoughts of death. To distract oneself. To enjoy life with superficial pleasures. Many people live this way.
However, the ancient gravestone reveals a deeper understanding of the problem: ‘We fall back from nothing to nothing,’ it says. This means that even our life before death is nothing. If death is the absolute end, then life before death becomes questionable. If death completely erases everything that is important and valuable to human beings, then there is nothing that can be enjoyed without anxiety. Everything is already infected by the annihilation that is sure to come. The person who wrote the epitaph recognised this. And he seems to have been deeply saddened by it.
At the time when the gravestone was erected, the gods and religion of antiquity had long since become questionable. Hardly anyone took this religion seriously anymore. It still served to stabilise society, but it offered no hope. Despite the many gods and idols, people lived ‘without God’ in a dark world, facing a dark future. It is easy to draw comparisons with people who live without God today.
Paul wrote a letter to the Christian community in Thessaloniki, that is, to believers who live in the midst of this ‘godless’ society. He wrote to them about the truth concerning the dead, namely that they will rise again. And that we will be together with them again and we will be with the Lord forever. Paul wrote this to the Thessalonians ‘so that they may not grieve as others do who have no hope.’
Those who do not believe have no hope. For those who do not believe, not only is the future dark, but also the present. ‘Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it become possible to live the present as well,’ as Pope Benedict XVI expresses it in his encyclical Spe Salvi.
What exactly does this hope of the faithful consist of? Before Christ, it was anything but clear. In the Old Testament, we find hardly any clear evidence of belief in the resurrection of the dead. The reading from the Second Book of Maccabees is one of the few exceptions. The text was written only a few decades before Christ. It tells of Judas Maccabeus, who prayed for his comrades who had fallen in battle and provided for a sin offering in the temple. It gives a thorough explanation of why it is meaningful and pious to pray for the dead. So, at that time, it was not something that was taken for granted.
In the Gospel, we heard how Jesus visited the sisters Mary and Martha, who were mourning their deceased brother Lazarus. Martha asked Jesus to pray for the deceased: ‘I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.’ But she did not understand Jesus’ true role in the resurrection of the dead. When Jesus assures her that her brother will rise again, she simply says, ‘I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.’ This is the faith that the Maccabees already had.
Then Jesus says the decisive words: ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.’
Jesus himself is the resurrection and the life. How can we understand this?
The paradoxical statement ‘though he die, yet shall he live’ shows that resurrection is not simply a resumption of one’s previous life. An endless continuation of our ordinary life would actually be nothing particularly desirable. Eternal life must be something else.
A few chapters further on in the Gospel of John, it becomes clearer when Jesus prays to God his Father and says: ‘This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’ (John 17:3).
‘To come to know God—the true God—means to receive hope,’ writes Benedict XVI. He continues: ‘Life in its true sense is not something we have exclusively in or from ourselves: it is a relationship. And life in its totality is a relationship with him who is the source of life. If we are in relation with him who does not die, who is Life itself and Love itself, then we are in life. Then we ‘live’.’
Eternal life is about our relationship with God in and through Jesus Christ. Outside of this relationship, there is neither hope nor true life. But in faith, in a living relationship with Jesus Christ, we are and remain connected to the source of life and have a hope that even death cannot take away from us.
We do not have this hope for ourselves alone. It applies to all who are in communion with Christ, both the living and the dead. When we stand at the grave of someone who has died in Christ and pray for them, we know that they have not ‘fallen back from nothing to nothing’. We do not need to despair in grief. For death cannot destroy our relationship with Christ. And with it, the connection to the source of life is not destroyed either. We can be sure that our dear departed will one day rise again and we will join them to meet the Lord. And then we will be with the Lord forever.
Amen.
