I spoke last week about what you might call keeping an eternal perspective. We can get pretty short-sighted sometimes, and there’s a fun and effective way to help people think that through. I call it the “what next?” game. Say you ask someone about to graduate, “what do you want to do when you’re finished with school? What’s after that?” They may reply “I hope to get a good job” or “I want to travel” or “I’m going to join the circus.” Don’t laugh, one of my college roommates and best friends did it and it’s worked out great for him. I’ve watched him juggle fire while riding a bicycle on a tight-wire. There’s got to be a sermon there somewhere, but I can’t find it right now.
Anyway, there’s some plan or idea about what happens after graduation. We only hope that, at some point, it may include gainful employment... great! What next? And you can see where this is going. Maybe there’s family in there, career, service, you keep asking “what’s after that?” until eventually you get to retirement, and eventually, if you keep asking long enough, “what’s after that?”, eventually you’ll get a hesitant admission that, “well, I suppose after that I will die.”
“What’s after that?” Ah. There’s the question. There’s the most important question in life, wouldn’t you say? You will perhaps be a little surprised, then, if I suggest to you that most Catholics, most Christians, will get this one wrong. They will say, “Well, hopefully, I’ll go to Heaven.” And that part is right. Your soul goes to Heaven to be with God when your body is buried in the earth.
“What next?” Most Catholics will not have an answer for that. They'll say, “Um... that’s it. That lasts forever.” Which is not Catholicism. In a few minutes we will stand up like we do every Sunday and say “I believe in the Resurrection of the dead,” or, as the Apostle’s Creed puts it, “the Resurrection of the body.” Which is something that pretty clearly hasn’t happened yet, even if your soul is with God.
Maybe you’ve been taught all this and it seems kind of obvious to you, but if so I fear you’re in the minority. It’s not that most Catholics disbelieve in the Resurrection of the body, it’s that they never think of it and have no real awareness of it. It’s just not on the radar.
When your soul is with God, and your body is in a grave, Resurrection has not yet happened to you. Resurrection is your body being raised, and reunited with your soul. Resurrection is when the tomb is empty.
The Church doesn’t claim to know the mechanics of this. Like, what if a particular Potassium ion from George Washington’s bicep later found itself naturally recycled in my deltoid, who gets it? Well, we pretty clearly aren’t going to get very far along that line of inquiry. We are agnostic about many things. But that doesn’t contradict the teaching of our Faith, which is that in some way we will have our bodies back on the last day.
Now this might seem like a sort of piece of trivia... maybe really interesting to know, but not really affecting our lives particularly. But in fact, the Resurrection of the Body radically changes the way we look at this world and the way we deal with it. It is critically important.
To understand why, let’s imagine it weren’t true. Let’s imagine that eternity is the union of the soul with God in Heaven, without bodily Resurrection ever entering into it. When the body is buried, then, we’re done with it. It will eventually break down and that will be it. There is no real sense, then, in which the body matters, except perhaps as a sort of souvenir. Even in life this body would be no more than a temporary vessel - something to be discarded and left behind as my spirit lives on forever. I might be fond of it, but it would be the sort of fondness you have for a thing.
The same would be true, actually, of all matter - the Earth, the cosmos, the Shawnee, all of it. This whole world of ours would be something to be left behind as we fly off to eternity. The whole world would be, in a word, disposable. Then, in comparison with the eternity before us, we would have to consider it meaningless. From the perspective of eternity, it would be no more important than yesterday’s trash.
Does this have practical significance? You bet it does, and you see it everywhere. You see it when people treat their bodies like disposable containers for pleasure. You see it when people think they can do anything impure with their bodies, and it doesn’t affect their soul, doesn’t affect the essence of who they are. You see it when we treat the Earth as something that exists only for our exploitation. You see it when we are told that the difference between male and female is only a matter of anatomical plumbing, and is therefore relevant to nothing, ever, except bathroom design. You see it when some of us retreat ever more from this real, physical world into an existence lived mostly on the screen of a laptop or smartphone.
Now contrast this with the Biblical vision. John sees the Holy City “coming down from God out of Heaven.” In that one short phrase, everything I just described is overturned. We don’t escape the world and fly off to heaven forever while it is discarded. The Holy City comes down, here. The world is not discarded, it is redeemed. Our bodies are not discarded, they are raised. Jesus came back to us eating and drinking, saying “Reach out your hand and touch me. I am not a ghost. I am real.”
This makes a huge difference in our lives right now, because it means that our bodies matter, that our world matters. It’s why we treat our bodies, and the bodies of others, not only with respect but with actual reverence. It’s why we incense the bodies of our dead at funerals, even though the soul has gone. It’s why we should treat the Earth in the same spirit as Adam and Eve in the Garden... something for which we have been given responsibility, a garden to be tended carefully because it belongs to Another.
It’s why we treat the physical act of union between man and woman with reverence. All the constant butting of heads between Catholic morality and modern “liberation” boils down to this one difference: we believe that when two become one flesh, they have stepped onto Holy Ground.
Like everything in Christianity, this leads us to Mission. We will not accomplish the Kingdom of God by gradually improving things until they are perfect; God will accomplish the Kingdom of God by the Last Judgment. But we don’t just sit around waiting until then. The seeds of the Kingdom are sprouting all around us. The leaven of the Kingdom is rising in the world. The salt of the Kingdom gives savor to our lives, and the light of the Kingdom bursts forth wherever Christ is Lord. The Holy City descendeth from Heaven... never more so than here in the Mass.
“Peace I leave you, my peace I give you,” says the Lord before he ascends to the Father. “Peace the world can not give.” The world can not give us this peace. We must give it to the world.
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