On Tuesday we celebrated All Souls Day. 203 names had been written on the commemoration cards and these were placed on the altar at the Sung Eucharist. We commemorated those we have known and loved and held their memory before God. Those who wrote names down I suspect felt a need deep enough to see that they were remembered. Many will also have felt that the person still exists in a distinct sense, so that they are able to be held in the presence of God.

This is one of those areas where there are actually clear differences between the religions. It is just not true to say that all religions are fundamentally the same. They are not. There are areas where we occupy common ground but there are also some stark differences and what happens to the dead is one of them. To a Hindu, who believes in reincarnation, an All Souls day Eucharist would have a very different feel to it. The soul would have moved on to another life, unless it had achieved its oneness with Brahman. The commemoration would look very different.

But then I wonder where Jesus’ words in our gospel reading (Luke 20:27-38) leave us? We are given the image of a woman who had 7 husbands - in succession, not all at the same time! The Sadducees, who wanted to show how crazy the whole idea of a resurrection was, came up with this scenario to expose a gaping hole in the belief. How can anyone say that we have an after life because if anyone remarries, and the expectation of the day was that they would, as indeed many do today too, who will they be married to in heaven? Jesus replies by exposing the hole in their argument. Their assumption is that everything remains as it was; nothing is changed; death is really nothing at all and we are all left exactly as we were - sound familiar? Jesus replies by pointing out that things are different in heaven and we are different too.

The poem or verse that I hinted at then, about death being nothing at all, comes from a long sermon by Henry Scott Holland, in 1910 which he preached in St Paul’s Cathedral in London. He was talking about 3 possible approaches to death. The first is the atheistic approach that death is the end of everything, there is nothing to follow because this life is all that there is. Not surprisingly he doesn’t agree with that view and as a Christian priest we wouldn’t expect him to.

He then goes on to talk about the view that nothing really happens when someone dies, they are everything that they ever were, and everything remains as it was. There is an unbroken continuity and nothing is changed. It is as if they have just slipped into the next room. The well known verse is an illustration of this view. He doesn’t have much time for this one either. Death is real he says, the long silence tells us that; people really do die. The verse on the greetings card has been wrenched so far out of context as to be a misquotation.

The idea that we are unchanged does not take account of our need for redemption and this is the third view that Henry Scott Holland goes on to discuss. No one is perfect and all of us stand as sinners before the throne of God’s grace in need of forgiveness and transformation. This is the idea that our half-listening society, which nominally calls itself Christian, has not grasped.

There are people who if they died, I would miss so much that I can’t find words to express the grief I would feel. I can understand very powerfully how some may be desperate to meet again and it is a notion that appears on gravestones either in the simplicity of one word “reunited” or with the unfortunate sounding phrase “rest in peace until we meet again”.

But there are also people that I have no desire to meet again if they are the same as they were when they died. For all I know they may have desired to see me again, but sadly their concept of heaven with us meeting again is my concept of hell. There are others who suffered so much, or who became a shadow of their former stature, even the person I had known was lost in one of those debilitating and destructive diseases; there are people who I would find it cruel if they remained unchanged and unhealed. I find the notion of resurrection with redemption far more appealing than the banality of death being nothing at all.

The New Testament has an understanding of all being united in Christ and it is in this sense that I can accept the word “reunited” being written on a gravestone. I remember going to see a woman before burying her husband. She took some persuading to see me in the first place because she didn’t want people saying nice things about him. When I called round she greeted me with the words “he was an utter b*****d for 30 years and I’ve been out to buy some new pots and pans to celebrate he’s gone”. Not the usual opener to a funeral visit!

There is something provisional about all of our relationships in this life. I think some may take that too far, but it may be that we can also take the opposite too far too. Even the most loving relationship, the one where someone dies of a broken heart when it ends through death, is subject to God’s redeeming love. We look to the hope of glory to come and whatever that means in detail it means that it treasures and honours both the deep longing and pining for what has been lost with the very need for redemption. Resurrection without redemption is to my mind no salvation at all. It is how we can find hope for the most notorious sinner as well as the one whose life seemed to us to be exemplary.

Jesus offered his questioners far more hope than they seemed to have realised. They had mistaken the resurrection for just a continuation of the life we have now. They needed to expand their imaginations and vision by a factor of several million. Jesus is effectively saying to them, think bigger. God holds before us a kingdom that we can only begin to imagine. There is a glory to come that often we dare not even dream. This is a love that neither condemns us to a continued cycle of birth and rebirth, nor when we make it strips us of everything that makes us who we are to absorb us into the eternal, nor just takes us as we are. It is a love that manages to take the person and keep hold of that, after all God created it, and some how unite us all in a mystical fellowship. This defies words, but it is salvation.

Death is not nothing at all, it is far more than that. If we thought what we have lost was good, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

© Ian Black 2004

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