Homily for the Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, 2022

What Happens To Us After We Die?

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Homily for the Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

St. Bridget of Ireland Catholic Church, Minneapolis, MN

Sunday, November 6, 2022

From ancient times to the present day, the great spiritual question, “what happens to us after we die?” has been of great interest to poets, philosophers, and religious figures. The Greek philosopher, Plato said that at death the spiritual soul escapes from the prison of the body and continues to live on a higher realm, the realm of forms. Surprisingly, some versions of Plato’s dualist view are still very influential today even among Christians. Ask Christians what happens after we die, and many will say that the soul escapes from the body and lives in the spiritual realm. As for Hinduism, it speaks of reincarnation or transmigration of souls into a new higher or lower body depending on how you lived your life on earth. Hinduism says after a person has died, the soul might reincarnate as a cat, a cat might reincarnate as a human being and a human soul might transmigrate into the body of another. This process of birth and rebirth is endless until the soul achieves “moksha,” or liberation. So, it is after a long process of purification that the soul finally shakes off its association with matter. This doctrine is old and enduring in the East, however, it has made its way in the West. As for the ancient Greek and Roman mythology, they claim that the dead go into a dreary and lifeless underworld where existence is rather grim and where the dead long for life above the ground. In the Old Testament, we see a theory that is similar to Greek and Roman mythology. Some OT texts say that the dead go to the land of Sheol. What’s Sheol? It is a kind of depressing, dark, shadowy underworld. Elsewhere in the OT we find an even grimmer view of what happens to the dead. Many texts indicate that the dead will simply disappear. They return to the dust of the earth. The Psalmist famously asked, “What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the grave? Will the dust praise you as I do today” (Ps. 30:9). The sense is that it is only the living that praise God. As for the dead, once they are gone, they go back to earth. Now, the shocking thing is that all these views of what happened to the dead are still held by people to this day. When you ask people what their afterlife view is, you will find some versions of all we have said so far. 

Although the Old Testament has two views of the afterlife that are not compatible with what we see in the New Testament, it does have one unique view that matches with the view littered everywhere in the NT— that at the end of the age, those who died will be restored to full embodied life in a transfigured way. This view is on display in today’s first reading taken from the second Book of Maccabees (7:1-14). At the time when the Jews were being persecuted, a whole family was being compelled to break the Jewish law that forbade eating pork. But the family heroically refused to do it even with the threat of death. As one of the sons faces death, he says to his executioners, “You accursed fiend, you are depriving us of this present life, but the King of the world will raise us up to live again forever.” As another son holds out his hands to his executioner to cut them off, he says, “It was from Heaven that I received these; for the sake of his laws I disdain them; from him I hope to receive them again.” As the last brother dies he says, “It is my choice to die at the hands of men with the hope God gives of being raised up by him…” In those words we find a distinctive doctrine of afterlife which insists that God will at the end of time bring back to life these heroic martyrs. Their language is not platonic dualism. It is not the language of the soul escaping from the body. It is not the language of gloomy Sheol. It is also not the language of resignation to nothingness. These young men are filled with uncommon confidence that God in his love will restore the dead to a full and elevated bodily life. 

Against this rich background we read the Gospel of today (Luke 20:27-38). We are told that the Sadducees— a priestly caste often associated with the temple worship in Jerusalem who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead came to Jesus with the question of the resurrection. Jesus has been preaching a different doctrine and the Sadducees have heard of it. So, they came to him and posed a puzzle meant to embarrass him, ridicule him and confuse his belief in the resurrection. They made up a story of seven brothers who, one after another, got married to the same woman during their earthly life. Then they asked Jesus, “At the resurrection, whose wife will that woman be?” Their question was meant to mock the belief in the resurrection. What does Jesus say? He says in the next life, in the resurrected life, people won’t marry or are given to marriage. How come? Because we won’t die. One of the prime purposes of marriage is the procreation of life. The need to procreate is based upon our own mortality. We have children because we know we are going to die. So when we die, our children will preserve the life of the human race. Since we won’t die, the concern to propagate human life won’t be needed. The point that Jesus is making is that the resurrected life is an embodied life but also an elevated, transfigured embodied life. It will no longer be saddled with mortality but now clothed with immortality. 

Of course this Gospel is a great anticipation of the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. All the Gospels witnessed the truth of Jesus’ terrible death in the hands of his executioners. Much like the story in the Second Maccabees, Jesus is a martyr in the hands of the enemies of Israel. He died and is buried. After that, nobody in the Gospel talks about Jesus’ soul escaping from his body. Nobody talks about Jesus going down to Sheol or to some boring existence. Nobody says he dies and stays in the grave. What they said is that Jesus rose embodied. He rose physically from the dead. They touched him. He ate in their presence. But his resurrection is not a return to this ordinary life. In numerous ways, Jesus shows that his resurrection transcends the limitation of space and time. That his resurrection is embodied, real and objective. When St. Paul was asked what resurrection is like, he speaks of a spiritual body. The resurrection is an embodied life, but it is also a body that has been spiritualized, elevated, transfigured, transformed, and more beautiful through God’s love. This is what happens to us after we die. Let’s thank God for it everyday.