Weekly Reflection 3/21/2021
REFLECTION
LIFE AFTER DEATH
MARCH 20-21, 2021
It is interesting, as a child you want to or are told to, memorize a prayer. Unfortunately, sometimes that comes back to haunt us. We start the prayer and it just rolls off our tongue. Don’t stop in the middle, you’ll never get restarted, you’ll have to go back to the beginning. Almost every Mass we profess our faith and yet, because we’ve memorized the Creed, we can get too familiar with it and forget the words we are saying. There is a line at the end of the Creed, “…and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead, and life in the world to come.” This is our faith; this is what we BELIEVE! But do we understand what we are saying? What do we mean when we say, and life in the world to come, life after our physical bodies have given out on us? Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, of going and preparing a place for us. This is not a radically new thought to the people of His time. Judaism has always maintained a belief in an afterlife, but the forms which this belief has assumed and the modes in which it has been expressed have varied greatly and differed depending on the period of time. So, life after death was not an unknown concept even to the Jewish people of Jesus’ time. But what do we believe based on what Jesus taught us? Jesus taught us the He is the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in him will never die, but will be raised up on the last day. The catechism tells us that It is Jesus himself who on the last day will raise up those who believe in him. St Augustine said, “On no point does the Christian faith encounter more opposition than the resurrection of the body.” Why? Because as Jesus put it when rebuking Peter, “…you are not thinking like God does, but as human beings do.” We think in terms of what we know and can comprehend with our mind, our feeble little mind. We got a glimpse of what Jesus’ resurrected body looks like during the transfiguration. It is THAT body, a transfigured body, a glorified body, that is reunited with our soul at the rising of the dead. The catechism tells us, “This ‘how’ exceeds our imagination and understanding; it is accessible only to faith.” But not blind faith. You see just like the Eucharist, we KNOW it is the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ because Jesus told us so Himself. Likewise Jesus told us that our bodies will be raised up; IF WE BELIEVE IN HIM. And like our encounter with the eucharist, the Creed ends with this word, AMEN; I believe.