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During the month of November, we call to mind those who have died: friends, family, members of this community.  November also brings the end of the church year.  For both of these reasons, today’s reading focus on death/  But more importantly, they also affirm the resurrection.  We are people filled with hope, because we believe that death is not the end. As we celebrate Mass today, let our hope in eternal life comfort us as we recall our beloved dead.

We would think it foolish to set out on a journey without knowing where we were going. In a broad sense, of course, our pilgrimage through life is largely a path into the unknown, a journey towards the destiny God sets for us. The Maccabee family whose martyrdom is reported in the first reading, believed very firmly that God had a place for them beyond death. The faith in the after-life expressed by each of them at the point of death is the most explicit in non-Christian Jewish literature. During this month of the Holy Souls, it is good to recall our faith in the resurrection of the body, and the our Church’s teaching about those who have gone before us and what kind of help we can hope to give them. It is the Catholic tradition that for all those who die without fully repenting their sins, there is a purification in the next life. We also believe that the departed on Purgatory should be prayed for by those living, and especially through offering Mass on their behalf. While popular folklore may imagine it as similar to hell but with a lower temperature, the Church teaches nothing specific on the nature of Purgatory. Any ideas people may have about it are pure guesswork. The Curé of Ars, Saint John Vianney, when asked about the life hereafter said very simply, “I know nothing of to-morrow, except that the love of God will rise before the sun.” Jesus promises at the Last Supper. “In my Father’s house there are many rooms and I am going to prepare a place for you.” While this offers us great hope it should not make us complacent, for we are daily challenged to choose between right and wrong, in order to follow the Lord of Life. If we do not live as God wants we feel an inner sense of unease. In his epic poem “The Dream of Gerontius” Saint John Henry Newman described Purgatory as a healing process, preparing us for God’s presence. He imagines the anguish in the souls of the departed because of their awareness of sins they have committed. But the Lord is there to heal that soul and draw us into heaven. This is what we pray for the Holy Souls in this month of November. A trick question was put to Jesus in the form of a cynical riddle. His critics questioned the existence of an after-life by the implausible tale of a woman who outlived her seven husbands, to embarrass Jesus and test his wits. In the afterlife, presumably we will be free of the bodily needs and appetites of our present experience. We will be like children in God’s presence, fully content, no longer needing what we need in this world. The human heart feels an inherent longing for the after-life. But the realm of the dead is what Shakespeare memorably called “The undiscovered country from whose Bourne no traveler returns.” Though nobody comes back to confirm it for us, through Jesus we believe it is real, just the same. As Paul said: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart to imagine what God has in store for those who love him.”​​​​​​

Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus to question him, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married and died childless; then the second and the third married her and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”

Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​