With Death, Life Is Changed Not Ended

As I write this on Thursday evening I have just returned from our Cathedral of St George where we celebrated the funeral mass of Bishop Howard Tripp who died peacefully at Little Sisters of the Poor in his ninetieth decade. As his coffin was lowered in the vault beneath the sanctuary the Archbishop said these words:

“Because God has chosen to call our brother. Bishop Howard from this life to Himself, we commit his body to its resting place, for we are dust and unto dust we shall return. But the Lord Jesus Christ will change our mortal bodies to be like His in glory, for he is risen, the firstborn from the dead. So, let us commend our brother to the Lord, that the Lord may embrace him in peace and raise up his body on the last day.”

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is challenged by the Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. In his reply, Jesus says “but those who are judged worthy of a place in the other world and in the resurrection from the dead … can no longer die, for they are the same as the angels, and being children of the resurrection, they are sons of God.”.

For us who remember the dead in this month of November, when we keep All Saints and all Souls and recall those who have died in the two World Wars we think of our own death. What will life after death be like? John writes in his first letter,

“My dear friends, we are already God’s children, but what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” St Paul tackles this question of the resurrection when he writes to the people in Corinth. He uses the image of the seed sown in the soil. It differs from the plant it produces. IN the same way, life on earth is different to the resurrected life. “It is the same with the resurrection of the dead: What is sown is corruptible, but what is raised is incorruptible; it is sown in contempt but raised in glory; it is sown in weakness but raised in power; it is sown a physical body and it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is a spiritual body too.” (1 Cor 15: 42-44)

How do the dead rise? The Catechism explains:

“In death, the separation of the soul from the body, the human body decays and the soul goes to meet God, while awaiting its reunion with its glorified body. God, in his almighty power, will definitively grant incorruptible life to our bodies by reuniting them with our souls, through the power of Jesus’ Resurrection” (ccc 997).

So, for each one of us, our death is the end of one journey and the beginning of another. I had written on my parent’s headstone the sentence from one of the prefaces of the Dead. “With death life is changed not ended.”

As someone wrote: “Death is the only doorway into the higher form of life. It is the great step forward into that imperishable, glorious and powerful fullness of life in the Spirit.”