All Souls Day
Duruflé Requiem“I will raise them up on the last day.” John 6.40
I fell into conversation with a woman while I was on holiday this time last week. When she discovered I was a priest, she started asking me questions about the recent death of her young mother and about her miscarriage a few months later.
Why had this happened? Was it punishment for something she had done wrong? Was her premature baby in heaven? What age were people in heaven?
All Souls and All Saints tide is one of the times in the church calendar when we are encouraged to ponder these questions which affect us al.
‘Why did this happen?’ the woman asked. We can answer that question. We don’t know. Bad things happen. It’s the experience of life we all share in one way or another. And some people, for no apparent reason, endure more than their share of bad things – and we don’t know why.
What about the other question: what happens after death? Here, we don’t know all that we’d like to know, but as Christians we share a hope that has been given to us by our Lord Jesus Christ himself.
Because we believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus - what we celebrate at this mass tonight - we believe in the resurrection of the dead.
We do not believe in re-incarnation or the transmigration of souls;These are all respectable beliefs, held by many people, but they are not Christian beliefs.
We do not believe in the absorption of the soul into the great soul of the universe, like a drop of water returning to the ocean;
We do not believe in existential oblivion – in Sartre’s words: “There is darkness without, and when I die, there will be darkness within."
Jesus said to his disciples and to all of us who follow in their footsteps: “I will raise you up on the last day”. He has already blazed the way for this.
Jesus appeared in a resurrection body; there was continuity with his old body and he was still the same Jesus – not a disembodied spirit, recognizable to his disciples.
I was listening to some tapes of my father the other day. He died five years ago. He was a radio ham and one of my earliest memories is of my father sitting in his ‘shack’ – in fact the larder of our little terraced house – surrounded by huge radios with glowing valves, tapping out in Morse code ‘This is G2DPY – George, two delta, Peter, yoke. The handle is Stan, the location is Sussex…’
50 years on, when he was in his 80s, and I in my 50s, he sat with his compact little solid state transmitter, sending out the same message, only by voice now rather than Morse (although he still used Morse with his old friends as it was quicker than talking!): ‘This is G2DPY – golf, two, delta, papa, Yankee (the new politically correct phonics). The handle is Stan the location is Sussex…’
It was the same message, the same Stan, but expressed through different media – a new transmitter, and the body of an old man.
Now, as they say in the world of Amateur Radio, he is a ‘silent key’.
Although there is much we cannot grasp about heaven, and much we cannot understand about the meaning of our lives here on earth…
Jesus shows us that there will be personhood; there will be recognition of one another; we will be raised up and not simply absorbed back into some universal life force.
From the point of view of our loved ones who have already died, many of whom we shall remember in a few moments, it is already the last day and they are raised up: a little sleep and then the dawn.
From our perspective, we still await the last day.
But the assurance is that whether we are alive, or as St Paul puts it, asleep in Christ; we shall all be raised up.
This is the Christian hope in the face of the death of our mortal body; what the former Dean of Westminster, Michael Mayne in the title of his book calls ‘The Enduring Melody’, the cantus firmus of our lives, the tune that weaves through all the changing scenes of life, and eventually, of death and new life.
Here is John Donne using different imagery, but making the same point. (It’s earlier on in that passage with the familiar words, ‘no man is an island’ and ‘ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’)
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.Or in the words of our Lord:
“I will raise them up on the last day.” John 6.40
