3rd Sunday after Easter 13.4.08 Easter mentality
It is proposed that soon we could be buried on the moon. It should not make any difference on the Last Day. Those on the moon also will rise.
Death is not the end, but a passing to glory. We think of the dead as in God’s presence. My Uncle Joe is not in West Terrace cemetery, getting rained on, but in heaven (or at least purgatory). A big difference of perspective.
Our Lord was building the apostles up to expect His resurrection. It was a tall order. Harder to get them to believe than to rise from the dead!
We understand the apostles’ difficulty because we ourselves are conditioned to think of death as final, even though we believe (partially at least) in the resurrection. It is just hard to see a dead body rising up again. It does not happen every day and is not part of our experience.
When standing in a cemetery it occurs to me that one day all these bodies will rise. A bit spooky perhaps, but just part of our creed (which passes unnoticed). It is outside of our normal experience but it will happen all the same. All at once on the same day.
It is not outside the power of God (no harder than making us in the first place).
The readings are about harnessing the Easter spirit so that we have a resurrection-mentality or a next-life-mentality, whereby all our dealings in this life will be conditioned by a familiarity and confident expectation of the next life.
This is a major point of struggle and immensely important to get right.
If we make a habit of including the next life in our thinking, regular daily thinking, then we will live much more happily and more usefully in this life.
It is good to be reminded how time-bound and earth-bound we are most of the time (carnal, as St Peter calls it). We need to be lighter on our spiritual feet, and more in tune with heavenly and eternal matters. The dead are not really dead, and we may not be really alive! Life equals union with Christ, and no other definition will do.
Our Lord is asking us to step into this other world, not only in hope of going there ourselves in due course, but already (cf epistle) of living like we were there. As in St Peter’s exhortations to live spiritually rather than in the flesh.
This is what I mean by making a habit of it (why the Church gives us an Easter season and not just a weekend). We need seven weeks (at least) to grasp the idea of resurrection, of living forever, of living in a different kind of world than the one we see around us.
We can make resurrection happen in the sense we can create a better kind of society by the way we live.
If more Christians lived like Christ we would start to see such a world.
In which case death would be seen as not so much a rude interruption to earthly plans, but a gentle transition to the ‘other’ house (like going down to the beach house) in which we are just as much at home.
The interplay between the two worlds is normal to us in some ways, for example, prayer. When we pray we routinely expect that the other world can hear us... angels, saints, Our Lady and God Himself.
We do not understand a lot of what goes on, but we know they are there, and believe our communication with them will make a positive difference.
This normal interaction includes also a comfortable sense that our loved ones are in God’s keeping and although beyond our direct communication they are very close, like in a different room of the same house. This is the best and most realistic grief therapy. They are with God; we are with God; so we must be with them also.
