What happens to us after we die?

Norman Mailer died yesterday.  In the little snippet I heard from NPR of a recorded interview, it seems he had an interesting view of the afterlife.  “I have no use for the concepts of heaven and hell.  Sitting around in an endless ‘Club Mediterranean” or in a fiery furnace for the rest of eternity doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”  The good news is that it didn’t make a lot of sense to Jesus either. 

What happens to us after we die?  Today’s readings and the Month of November in the church bring us smack up against that question. 
Poets, phil., religious figures – all have weighed in on the subject.  The spectrum of answers is wide.  You have the dualism of Plato – that our soul lives on after escaping the prison of the body in a higher realm, the realm of the forms.  Hinduism’s believes in the transmigration of souls, where finally, after a long series of incarnations, the soul might finally shake off its connection to the body.  Roman and Greek mythology had the drab and lifeless underworld.  Old Testament had several notions – ranging from Sheol – a kind of drab, dark, shadowy underworld to the grimmest Old Testament view that the dead simply disappear.  They return to the dust of the earth.  The psalmists prays: “Can the dead give you praise, as I do today.”  What happens to us after we die.

What makes it difficult is that no one has come back from the dead, except Jesus – and that witness is known to faith – to tell us what it is like.  But today’s scriptures tell us a few things about the world to come.  The Maccabee children expressed confidence that God would restore what they were freely giving up.  The one son proclaims as they are about to chop off his hands: “It was from heaven I received these.  And heaven one day, will give these back to me.”  This is not a platonic dualism.  Nor rhetoric of gloomy, shadowy sheol.  This was a trust that God would restore them to LIFE.  And since they had no concept of a soul apart from the body, that life somehow involved a body.  All that they are about, will be caught up in the life of the God whom had created them. 
           
In the gospel, we see that the tension to understand ‘What happens after death’ is still under debate.  The Sadducees did not accept the notion of an afterlife.  So the ‘story’ they bring to Jesus is in their minds without answer and will make Jesus look foolish, no matter how he responds.  But Jesus beats them at their own game.  There is a heaven, a “what happens next” and though the children of this age will neither marry, nor be taken in marriage, (because that is all about ‘living after death through your children) their lives will be caught up in relationship to the living God.  Heaven, the afterlife, the ‘what happens after we die’ is all about that covenant relationship with the living God.  “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him, all are alive.”  This is the faith that Jesus dies into.  (The resurrection of Jesus changes even that.)
   
“What happens after we die” is all about the connections that God has chosen with us and we with God.  How could God forget Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?  How could he ‘not remember them, not be present to them’, for they were so present to God in their life.  Just as the Maccabee children trusted that God would restore what they had sacrificed, what they had given in love, then what we sacrifice, what we give away in love becomes the fabric of our eternity. 
   
So, what does it all mean?  Is it not this?  For better or worse, what we give away in love, what we do for love, what we suffer for love, becomes what will be caught up in our relationship with the living God in the hereafter.  How we live now is not just crucial to our eternity – it is our eternity.  What we do today at home, the justice we act out of in our workplace, the compassion we show to the stranger and orphan, becomes the ‘stuff’ which is caught up with the living God.  We are already becoming the children of God and what will rise and what will need to be purified in us is being formed with each breath we take.

What happens after we die?  It is more than an endless club med experience or an eternity of fiery flames, as Norman Mailer reflected.  All that WE are will be caught up into God – a transformed body and a transformed spirit.  And each day we live either brings that reality sharper into focus, or gives us more that has to be purified.  The choice is yours…