“To
be or not to be—that is the question:
Whether
'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or
to take arms against a sea of troubles
And
by opposing end them. To die, to sleep--
No
more—and by a sleep to say we end
The
heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That
flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly
to be wished. To die, to sleep--
To
sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For
in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When
we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must
give us pause. There's the respect
That
makes calamity of so long life.
For
who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The
oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The
pang of despised love, the law's delay,
The
insolence of office, and the spurns
That
patient merit of the th' unworthy takes,
When
he himself might his quietus make
With
a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To
grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But
that the dread of something after death,
The
undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No
traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And
makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than
fly to others that we know not of?
Thus
conscience does make cowards of us all,
And
thus the native hue of resolution
Is
sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And
enterprise of great pitch and moment
With
this regard their currents turn awry
And
lose the name of action.”
In this soliloquy, Shakespeare's Hamlet
is thinking of taking action against his uncle the new king. But that
could prove fatal and Hamlet concludes that people do not take risks
because of the fear of death. But it is not the fear of nonexistence
but of an afterlife that bothers him. If death is merely sleep,
that's OK. But what if that sleep has the equivalent of nightmares?
Though
this is often cited as a very deep meditation on life and death,
Hamlet's worry is not that of most people. Few people fret about an
unpleasant afterlife. They are more troubled by the idea that there may be no afterlife. Hamlet sees death at best as sleep but for most
people the snuffing out of the flame of life is not a good thing. We
struggle to live and stay alive. We want to survive death. And indeed
the earliest indication of the belief in an afterlife is in the
burial of Neanderthals, 50,000 years ago, complete with flowers,
tools and food left with the bodies. Is this merely a vain hope or an
ancient spiritual insight?
The
oldest recorded religion, that of the Egyptians, posited an elaborate
afterlife for those who had sin-free hearts, were properly mummified
and knew all the passwords in the Book of the Dead. In contrast, in the
early parts of the Old Testament, there is little said about the fate
of the dead. When the afterlife is referred to at all it is called
Sheol, which literally means “pit” or “grave.” In the few
pictures we get of it, it's depicted as a gray half-life where people
are weak and do not praise God. Often leaders and kings are said to
be “gathered to their people” or to “sleep with their fathers” but there is reason to believe these are just traditional euphemisms for
the death of the great.
The
exceptions to these gloomy glimpses of the afterlife are the unique
fates of Enoch who walked with God and then is taken by him and
Elijah who is taken to heaven by a fiery chariot and a whirlwind. We
also have references in Psalms 16, 45 and 73 to some kind of
continued communion with God. In addition there are a few references
to resurrection. Most, like our passage from Ezekiel 37, use
resurrection as a metaphor for the revival of the nation of Judah
after their exile. But a few do seem to refer to individuals being
resurrected. Isaiah 26:19 says, “Your dead shall live, their
corpses shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth shall give birth to
those long dead.” Daniel 12:2 reads, “Many of those who sleep in
the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some
to shame and everlasting contempt.” However these resurrection
references are not developed further.
As
God's revelation unfolds in the New Testament, we get a clearer and
more detailed picture of the afterlife. For instance, without an afterlife, there
is no justice in this world. People do not treat others as they wish
to be treated. Good people do not get rewarded as they should; evil
people too often get away with the damage they inflict on others. But in God's universe such things will not stand forever. The justice denied in this life
is redressed in the next. The unrepentent wicked receive
punishment. Jesus calls that “Gehenna,” literally the valley of
Hinnom on the southern edge of Jerusalem. During the last dark days
of the kingdom of Judah before the exile, this was the site of pagan
worship, where parents and Jewish kings sacrificed their children to
Molech by fire. In Jesus' day it was the city garbage dump where
trash was burned day and night. That was Jesus' metaphor for hell.
For
those who realize how far from God's glory they have fallen and who
turn to Him, their fate is to be in the presence of God, immediately
after death. It is difficult to say whether the individuals are
conscious or not. 9 times Paul speaks of believers who died as having
“fallen asleep.” Yet, as we see in our gospel, this may be a convention of speech like our
“passed away” because when facing execution Paul says being in
Christ's presence is better than this earthly life.
If
this sounds rather vague for a description of our final state, you're
right. If this were our final state. But it's not. Jesus'
resurrection was not only a validation of who he was; it is also the
pattern for the afterlife proper. In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul speaks of
the discomfort of being “unclothed” in the intermediate state right after death and
desiring to be better clothed. He speaks of our present bodies being
like a tent, a temporary habitat, as opposed to the permanent house
made for us by God. Being incorporeal is unnatural and temporary. The
reason this intermediate time is not better described is the same
reason why travel brochures don't say much about waiting lounges.
That's not the destination.
Contrary
to popular belief, our final state is not to be disembodied spirits in heaven. We are created as body-spirit unities; our destiny is to
be whole beings once again. God will not abandon his creation, nor
give up on creatures created in his image. He intends to restore us
to what we were intended to be. Unlike the angels who are spirits or
animals who are physical, we were created to be amphibians, as C. S.
Lewis put it, creatures who are at home both in the spiritual and the
physical realms. So our restoration means we must be embodied.
Notice
that in our gospel passage (John 11) Jesus says, “I am the
resurrection and the life.” He is the origin of the process, the
source of resurrection, and the channel of new life. In John 1:3 it
says, “All things were created through him...” His signature, so
to speak, is on everything. And God plans that all things will be
re-created through Jesus.
Everything in creation ends or dies. It
either stops working or something or someone else stops it from
working. The troops that crucified Jesus stopped his body from
working in the most painful, gruesome way possible. But then he rose
from the dead. The source of life and resurrection re-entered the
world, better than ever. He set the pattern for our resurrection.
Not
only is Jesus' resurrection a pattern for our own but it is a pattern
for the whole of creation. Some people, including some Christians,
think that God just wants to end the world. But that's not what the
Bible says. God created this world and pronounced its component parts
good and the entirety very good. But in Genesis 6:11, it says, “The
earth was ruined in the sight of God; the earth was filled with
violence.” In 6 short chapters we turn God's earthly paradise into
hell on earth. What is God's response? Start over, which means
clearing away what's gone bad, what's been corrupted and infected and
keeping what's good. That's the essence of the Noah story. God is
giving creation a clean start. He reboots it and returns it to the
manufacturer's original settings, as it were.
And
that's what we see at the climax of the Book of Revelation. The earth
is cleansed from all evil including death and pain and grief. And
Revelation 21:1 says, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for
the first heaven and the first earth had passed away...” In other
words God resurrects creation from the ashes of the old one, the way he
raised the pierced, scourged and ravaged body of Jesus from the dead and
transformed his body so that it no longer had the limitations our
bodies do. In the same way he will raise us, giving us new bodies,
while retaining the essence of who we are. Or to paraphrase physicist
and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne, God will install our same
software, debugged, into new hardware.
We
see the opposite all the time. We see the loving bright child turn
into the distant burnout thinking only of the next fix. We seen the
hopeful young person turn into the bitter angry adult through the
insults of a hard life. We see soldiers return from the hell of war
and their families and friends slowly realize they are not the same
person, but an angry, depressed and self-destructive version of what
they were. We see how negative transformation works, how the stuff
that people have seen and have done and what was done to them can
make them shells of who they were. God wants to transform us too, but
positively; and not into what we once were, but into what he always
intended us to be.
Resurrection
is, in essence, transformation, taking what no longer works and
making it over, improving and perfecting it. When they starting remaking the longest running science fiction series Doctor Who, they
retained what worked—the eccentric time traveler and his human
companions fighting evil, human or alien, anywhere in time and
space—and changed what didn't—25 minute episodes with storylines
that ran for 4 to 6 weeks, main characters with no emotional depth or
personal history, rubber monsters with visible zippers and special
effects not much improved over that of the original Star Trek. And
the show grew from a cult classic known chiefly to Brits and a few
thousand fans outside the UK into an international hit. But it had to
have worth originally, even in its less than ideal state.
God
takes us, in our less than ideal state and transforms us into what he
had in mind for us all along. But that doesn't mean frozen in some
kind static perfection. Eastern Orthodox theology does not see
humanity, even in its unfallen state, as everything God fully
intended us to be. Even in paradise we were not to remain exactly as
we were when first created but we were to grow spiritually and become
more than what we started as. When we sinned, we arrested our upward
progress and not only regressed but devolved into less than we were
at the point of our creation. When we surrender to Jesus, we start to
progress once more. In this life we are mostly just making up what we lost.
But in our new life, we will be restored to what should have been our
starting point—complete harmony and unity with God—and then go on
from there. Never forget: we are intended to mirror an infinitely
wise and loving God. As finite creatures that adventure will never
end. We will always be going further up and further into the endless
love that is our Triune God.
Resurrection
is also a validation of us as God's creations. Our moral flaws we may
regret but not the individual characteristics he gave us. Again since
we are to mirror an incomprehensibly large and multi-faceted God, it
will take each of us with our particular talents and quirks and
insights and gifts and skills and perspectives and creativity and
ability to make connections to do that. We are like pieces of a vast living mosaic portrait of the Mind that made all. Each of us must be of the
proper shape and size and hue, perfectly polished, and in the right
relationship to each other, to reflect the rainbow of his radiance.
Our task is to let him use us how and where he wants us to be.
As
for the shape of the new creation and the description in Revelation of the new
Jerusalem, with its crystal clear walls and its streets of gold and
its bejeweled foundation and its gates of pearl—if it seems too
hard to imagine, well, that's the point. It is a vision of the
indescribable, overwhelming the power of words to capture anything so
wonderful. Whatever the reality, it is more rather than less than how it was pictured.
The
same can be said for our new post-resurrection state. As it says in 1
John 3:2, “Dear friends, we are God's children now, and what we
will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when he appears, we
will be like him because we will see him as he is.” Like children
our mature appearance is as yet unknown, except that we will be like
our Father, and we will at the last see him as he is, a beatific
vision beyond our current state of knowledge. As 2 Corinthians 2:9 says,
“No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has imagined the things
that God has prepared for those who love him.” Through his word and
through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, we have been given
glimpses of what is to come. And if all of those reveal only a
fraction of how wonderful it will be, we have a lot of growing to do
before we will be able to take it all in.
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