Why are we here this evening? That may sound an odd question but it is a good place to start because it takes us to the heart of the Christian hope. And if this service is not firmly rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ and the hope we have in him then it will wander and stray into some odd places. Some Christian practices have done that over the centuries and so it does us no harm to go back to first principles, to make sure how we commemorate the departed actually proclaims the faith of Christ and does not in effect undermine it.

The question of why we are here this evening is also partly triggered by reading the latest book to come from the pen of the new Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, called ‘For all the saints? Remembering the Christian Departed’. Bishops of Durham have over the years had a tendency to be a controversial lot, but that is because they make us think about the foundations of our faith - well David Jenkins did and Tom Wright is going to do the same.

Tom Wright’s book demands that we ground our commemoration this evening in the New Testament. In doing this he has a couple of notions in his sights and from this quite a lot else flows.

Firstly Tom Wright makes a point that I have mentioned before and that Norman made on Sunday. The term saints, in the New Testament, is one used to refer to all Christians. It is not a word reserved for an elite super league. So All Saints is not so much a festival for the whole college of a Christian elite as a reminder that all Christians are the saints. We have lost our grip on this because we have concentrated on the celebrities of faith, forgetting that in Christ there are no distinctions, no hierarchies. In other words we and our loved ones are not second class believers. So this evening’s commemoration must have one foot in a proper understanding of Sunday’s festival or it pushes our Christian understanding and self understanding out of shape. That is a background point, setting the context for this commemoration.

The second point is perhaps even more radical, especially to our times. We have made the word soul into an object, a ‘thing’, where in the New Testament it would be better described as a state of being. Let me explain.

The New Testament does not talk about human beings as having immortality as if we are an immortal soul trapped in a temporal body. It does not make that kind of distinction. The soul at death is not like a butterfly being released form the cocoon. Immortality is a gift of God in Christ. So the ‘soul’ is not so much a thing, ‘the soul’, as a way of talking about what it is to be a person in the presence of God. It is a way of talking about what it is to be a person having some kind of continuity when the body ceases to be relevant, when it discontinues. For computer buffs, it is like saying that God will download our software onto his hardware so that it can be run once more - so those who have died are sustained in life by God (N T Wright p72). The soul is therefore not so much a ‘thing’ as a state of being!

This may come as a bit of a surprise to many since we have rather come to presume and therefore take for granted what is actually in New Testament terms seen as a gracious gift from God. Immortality seen as an innate human characteristic comes from Plato and is not biblical. God gives this gift in his mercy and love, and who he chooses to give it to is God’s prerogative alone. Salvation belongs to God and he judges by different criteria to our more narrow field of vision! So it does not really make sense, in New Testament terms, to talk of life beyond death but rather of life after death. Death is a real full stop, but in God’s grace it becomes something else. Ironically this is probably more in tune with contemporary science than notions of the soul as a thing are.

If we put these two notions together - that the saints are not an elite group but all Christians and that immortality is a gift rather than an innate characteristic - we find ourselves staring, gazing into the Christian hope.

To the New Testament writers the resurrection is not what happens on death but is something yet to come in a distant future. It will be the final consummation of all things, when all who are with Christ will be transformed into glory. Paul talks of it as an awakening and uses this metaphor to say that when it happens everything that was before will seem to be like sleep in comparison. It is a hope of something truly tremendous, beyond our capacities to grasp now.

This all leaves us with a gap. The gap is the time or state between death and this resurrection to come. It is as if there is a state that is in between death and the resurrection to come where the dead are with Christ in what the New Testament calls paradise. We might call it heaven. But going to heaven when you die is not actually what the New Testament holds out as the main goal. The main goal is to be transformed into the glorious likeness of Christ. Going to heaven seems to be more of an intermediate stage.

But where does that leave us in terms of judgement and what happens to the sins that weigh so heavily on us? The short answer is that death puts them to an end. Death is itself an end and anything after is a gracious gift which lies with God to give to whom he wills according to his loving judgement that fortunately for all of us far exceeds our own! So Christ has ruled a line under our sins that means they cease to be relevant after death and we need to forget all the powerful images of Dante’s Inferno and times of purging so that we can be scrubbed clean. Notions of purgatory have no basis in the New Testament and are not the New Testament hope. In Christ all our sins are dealt with through the cross. The faith is not that he deals with some and not others, but that all sin is dealt with. By God’s gracious mercy, we can attain everlasting life; there is no half promise here.

To the New Testament the after life seems to have two stages. Firstly the dead are with Christ in some way, in paradise, what we might call heaven, but it then has a notion that at the last days Christ will bring about a magnificent event in which the dead are raised to a new form of existence.

So what we are not doing this evening is commending the dead to God again. We did that at their funerals - or will do so if it has not yet taken place. What we must not do tonight is anything that implies the funeral has not worked or more to the point that Christ’s promise that the dead will be with him was only a half promise. If we do that we are in danger of grieving like those who have no hope and as Paul put it, ‘who can separate us from the love of God… nothing in all creation’, not even death.

What we do tonight when we offer the names before the altar and then later light candles is hold those who have died ‘in the love that passes into prayer’. And in so doing remind ourselves of the great Christian hope. The dead are with Christ and with them we long for the glorious resurrection which will change us all from glory into glory. Christ does not make half promises so we should not behave as though this is only half a hope! It is for all, for all Christians are described as the saints of God. Immortality is a gift that is given in love and that is about our whole person being drawn into his presence, not just some detachable pod we call ‘the soul’. Exactly how this happens is a mystery, but deep in this language and imagery is the Christian hope we celebrate this evening. It is in this hope that we say ‘Alleluia. Amen’.

© Ian Black 2003

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