Death

Several people expressed a desire to read this one.

A Homily for All Souls’ Day
Trinity College Chapel:

Monday 2 November, 2009

St Matthias, Bellwoods:

Wednesday 4 November, 2009

I have to confess that I get tired of hearing people say “passed on” instead of “died”. To use a synonym or elegant variation of terms from time to time is one thing; but this is a euphemism, and that is quite another. Too often it seems that people are not so much afraid of death as afraid of talking about it. But on All Souls’ Day, when we remember in love all the Faithful Departed, we must think about death. Words are subtle, and as a metaphor to speak of death as “passing away” is respectable. In The Catholic Religion, Vernon Staley’s remarkably sane little manual of instruction for Anglicans, we read, “Death is the separation of the soul from the body. We speak of death as ‘the passing away’, for in death the soul leaves the body as a tenant quitting a house.” That’s fair enough, and it is certainly based on experience. Look on a dead body; something essential thing that made it a person is gone. But change the metaphor just a little, from “passing away” to “passing on”, or even, as I often hear “passing”, and you enter into a whole new world of thought. Perhaps it is because I have spent too much of my life in school, but I can’t help but think that when someone is said to have “passed” they’ve finished a course and moved up to the next grade. That image: going to the next stage in a process of growth and perfection seems to be an attractive metaphor for dying. Attractive it may be, but it is not an image found in Scripture: it is not the hope of the Gospel.
Many of the things we hear said about death are like that. Attractive images that are meant to help us cope. But the mission of the Church is not only, or not precisely, to give people attractive images that will help them cope with life, but to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ, who came to defeat sn and death, and raise us to new Life. And so on this All Souls Day we proclaim the words of Jesus,
Jesus said to them, … “This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.

How different from this is the idea of a person passing on, perhaps to some disembodied life in paradise. But that is the idea many, if not most people have of the Christian belief and hope. For a good analysis of common beliefs, you would do well to read the opening chapters of Bishop N. T. Wright’s recent book Surprised by Hope; but I have recently had to look at other evidence of it. Not long ago, I was asked by my family to look over a selection of verses that were considered appropriate for a memorial card. The selection is well worth reading, for in it we find the words of Scripture side by side with other writings that express a wide variety of beliefs that suggests a muddle of beliefs. Some are vapid, and even if they can give comfort, there is little of hope in them:

When a loved one becomes a memory,

a memory becomes a treasure.

Treasure the memories.

Others express what Wright calls “a sort of low-grade, popular nature religion with elements of Buddhism. At death one is absorbed into the wider world, into the wind and the trees.” The example is well-known:

Do not stand at my grave and weep.

I am not there. I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow;
I am the diamond glints on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain;

I am the gentle autumn rain.

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft star that shines at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry!

I am not there. I did not die.

When you know perfectly well that someone you love and care for is dead, to be fobbed off with such stuff is galling. “Do not stand at my grave and weep.” What arrogance to say this among the people of Christ, who wept when he stood at the grave of his friend! Indeed we find that bit of gnosticism in the verses as well:

Don’t grieve for me, for now I’m free,

I am following the path God laid for me.

I took his hand when I heard him call,

I turned my back and left it all.

Is any of this Christian faith and hope?] Where is the goodness of creation, which God declares in the opening of Genesis? What of the promise of the renewal of creation, which is so triumphantly declared in the final chapters of Revelation, as we heard yesterday? Or is all this to wiped away, and replaced by something else? Where is the note of triumph that was once heard at every funeral? One would think that death was not the enemy that destroys God’s human creatures, an enemy defeated and trampled underfoot by Christ, but a friend who releases, even frees us from the body?
As Bishop Wright remarked, “if the promised final future is simply that immortal souls leave behind their mortal bodies, then death still rules—since that is a description not of the defeat of death but simply of death itself, seen from one angle.” And he calls us to look again to the scriptures and faith of the Church to discover once more the surprising hope that is promised: not of passing to another plane of existence, but the hope of the resurrection of the body and renewed life.

Time will not permit us even to start considering all that this implies. But let it remind us that we need to have a clear idea of what they believe about these deep and central questions of human life. And I would suggest that before we run off to look for our beliefs in other places, we look into our own traditions. At the core of traditional teaching we find the promise of the Resurrection, which is nothing less than the promise that it is the whole human person that is to be saved. This speaks volumes about the moral value of our life, of the body, of the actions we take in this life. But all I can do now is to urge you to look more deeply into the matter. Bishop Wright’s book is a good place to start, but you find the same doctrine in older works of theology, including Staley’s Catholic Religion, where we are reminded that the disembodied soul is only a part of the complete human person, and only by the resurrection can the whole person be perfected in eternity

Now I must finish with a word about the final verse of the epistle, which describes the end of faith as “the salvation of your souls”. Does this not teach that salvation is about our souls, with the implication, “not our bodies”? I hope you will forgive me if I quote the Bishop of Durham now, for he made a very helpful comment on the meaning of the word psyche in this verse:

'The word psyche was very common in the ancient world and carried a variety of meanings. Despite its frequency both in later Christianity and (for instance) in Buddhism, the New Testament doesn’t use it to describe, so to speak, the bit of you that will ultimately be saved. The word psyche seems here to refer like the Hebrew nephesh, not to a disembodied inner part of the human being but to what we might call the person or even the personality. And the point in 1 Peter 1 is that this person, the “real you,” is already being saved and will one day receive that salvation in full bodily form. That is why Peter quite rightly plants the hope for salvation firmly in the resurrection of Jesus. God has, he says, “given us new birth to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah from the dead.”'
Indeed, psyche is often to be translated not as soul but as life, as in Mark 9.35, “For those who want to save their life (psychen) will lose it, and those who lode their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it”. Elsewhere the dictionaries tell us it means a human individual. It seems then, a bit arbitrary to insist on its meaning immaterial soul in 1 Peter.

There is more to say,* but perhaps I can sum up all with an adaptation of the traditional prayer for the departed which is fortunately becoming more common.
Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord; and may light perpetual shine upon them.
May they rest in peace and rise in glory.

*After I preached at St Matthias, the thurifer expressed the hope that on another All Souls' Day I might explain that people do not become Angels when they die. I said that I believed most people at St Matthias were aware of this