Back
when I was a seminarian in Washington, DC, in the 1980s, the Vietnam War Memorial was
dedicated. People come constantly to that wall of names to find and honor the
name of someone they knew and loved. They’re just names, of course, but there
is something very special about them, because someone has written them – and
someone remembers them. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, I saw
something similar in New York – in makeshift shrines in front of firehouses and
other places – names and pictures of people being remembered.
Surely,
our ability to remember is one of the things that makes us most human. When we
remember those who have died, we recognize the humanity we share. We remember
that, like us, they also lived once, and that, like them, we too will surely
die.
The
famous story in today’s 1st reading [2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14] of the seven brothers and their mother,
who were willing to die rather than to disobey God’s law, was written to
remember those heroes from the great war which Israel fought for its freedom in
the 2nd century before Christ. In remembering those martyred heroes,
the story also celebrates their faith that God would raise them up to live again forever.
In our Catholic tradition,
this time of year is focused in a particular way on the end, and the month of
November is dedicated in a special way to remembering and praying for those who
have died.
Our faith challenges us to
treat all of life as a preparation for a good death and not to neglect our duty
to pray for those who have gone before us. Hence, the importance of a proper
funeral - an especially privileged moment when the entire Church visibly
intercedes on behalf on the recently deceased. (Sadly, one study I read
recently suggested that only about 66% of US Catholics who have died in recent
years have had a full Catholic funeral.) But especially in this Holy Year
of Mercy, we have been reminded that praying for both the living and the dead
is one of the seven spiritual works of mercy, while burying the dead counts as
one of the seven corporal works of mercy.
Recently the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith has issued a new Instruction “Regarding the
Burial of the Deceased and the Conservation of the Ashes in the Case of
Cremation.” The Instruction does not teach anything really new. Rather it
represents a timely restatement of what, not long ago, would have been the
common Christian understanding, but now needs to be restated due to the
increasing acceptance of secular and neo-pagan, post-Christian beliefs and
practices about death. Thus, we are reminded that:
Following the most ancient
Christian tradition, the Church insistently recommends that the bodies of the
deceased be buried in cemeteries or other sacred places.
Burial is our tradition, but
the church recommends it not just as traditional but also because:
Burial in a cemetery or
another sacred place adequately corresponds to the piety and respect owed to
the bodies of the faithful departed who through Baptism have become temples of
the Holy Spirit, and it encourages family members and
the whole Christian community to pray for and remember the dead, while at the
same time fostering the veneration of martyrs and saints.
While
traditional burial remains the norm, nowadays the alternative of cremation can also
be permitted, but the conservation of the ashes of the departed in a domestic residence is not
permitted. Nor may the ashes be divided among various family members. Nor
is it ever permitted to scatter the ashes of the faithful departed in the
air, on land, at sea or in some other way, nor may they be preserved in
mementos, pieces of jewelry or other objects.
Two
centuries after the Maccabean martyrs [Luke 20:27-38], there were those (notably the cultured priestly elite
known in the Gospels as the Sadducees), who lived without any hope of future
resurrection – just as there are many today, who live their entire lives
believing that this is all there is and all that there will ever be (for,
indeed, as St. Paul pointedly acknowledges in today’s reading from his 2nd letter to the Thessalonians [2Thessalonians 2:16 – 3:5], not
all have faith.)
If,
in fact, this life is all there is, then, of course, your only immortality will
be your children. In such a world, the worst thing would be to die leaving no
one behind to continue your name. Hence, the special provision in the Old
Testament Law, that required the brother of a man who had died childless to raise up descendants for his brother.
The Sadducees invoked what they saw as the implications of this law to ridicule
the very idea of a future resurrection.
The
Sadducees’ problem, however, was precisely their inability to imagine any life
from this present life - a life limited, indeed defined, by death. But, as
Jesus pointed out, the resurrected life will be different. We will still be
ourselves. We’re not going to change into somebody – or something – else, as
reincarnation alleges. We will, however, be living a new and completely
different kind of life, no longer limited and defined by death.
The
Sadducees illustrate what happens when we try to imagine in too much detail what
that will be like, because, of course, the only life we can actually imagine is
the one we already know and live, here and now. Jesus, however, has himself
already risen from the dead and is now living that new life. And in him we get
a glimpse into that new life God has in store for us, not as some continuation
of the way things are now, but as something totally new, a new life we hope,
because of him, to live with him forever.
Homily for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, November 6, 2016.
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