The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead
The commemoration of our beloved dead on All Souls Day has roots in ancient Christian tradition, Faith in the God of Life in the land of the living survives death.
Introduction from Fr. Gordon MacRae: In the last days of October 2020, I wrote a special post to commemorate All Souls Day and to honor our beloved dead. One reviewer called it “A tour de force of Sacred Scripture on the most crucial question of all time: the meaning of life and death.” I’m not sure it actually rises to that level, but I thought it was an okay post.
It was the last one published at These Stone Walls, the older version of this blog that one week later was taken down and then reborn anew as Beyond These Stone Walls. I wrote of how and why that happened in “Life Goes On, Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls.”
It was not planned this way, but my post to mark the commemoration of All Souls was published in the midst of a global pandemic just days before the most contentious U.S. presidential election of modern time. That was also the time in which my friend, Pornchai Moontri, had been handed over to ICE for a long and grueling ordeal leading up to deportation to his native Thailand.
For many readers, my All Souls Day post was relegated to a far back burner then so I have decided to rewrite it and post it anew. It is, after all, a matter of life and death. Please ponder it and share it with others.
Like all of you reading this, I, too, have been touched by death in ways that have changed my life. I once wrote of how death left me not only grieving, but entirely alone and stranded. It was a post about the essence of Purgatory and why it should not be feared. That post — which I highly recommend if you have ever been touched by death, is “The Holy Longing: An All Souls Day Spark for Broken Hearts.”
It is one of the mysteries of Sacred Scripture that certain concepts exist there in almost equal measure with their polar opposites. I wrote during Holy Week, 2020, of the presence of both good and evil at the same table in “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light.” Many readers expressed amazement at my revelation that the concepts of light and darkness are represented in Scripture in almost equal measure, but with light just only slightly more prevalent.
I was surprised, for this post, to discover that the same is true in the matter of life and death. I conducted some research into the various permutations of the word, “death” in Sacred Scripture. The terms, death, dead, die, died, and killed have a combined appearance for a total of 1,620 times in our Old and New Testaments. The same research into occurrences of the word, “life” included the terms, life, alive, living, lives and lived. The combined appearances of “life” totaled 1,621. Pro-life wins!
Our Scriptures, and especially their revelations in the words of Jesus who had … well … the “inside scoop,” not only give life and death almost equal weight, but place them on a continuum. This becomes most evident in a challenge of Jesus to the Sadducees who rejected any notion of an afterlife or resurrection:
“You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God … And as for the resurrection from the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God? ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”
Jesus was citing the Book of Exodus (3:1-6) and the story of Moses’ first encounter with God in the burning bush. By Yahweh’s self-description that he is the God of these Patriarchs who died long ago, Jesus brings his listeners to a conclusion that they must still live for God to still be their God. Their ongoing presence with God is the decisive precondition for future resurrection.
For Jesus, this ongoing presence of the soul with God is a continuation of the very life you know — but without the excess baggage. What must such a state be like? I sometimes hear from people who long to have some affirmation from their departed loved ones that they still exist. Do we really need such evidence? One of the most hopeful verses in all of Scripture comes from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, and it has an answer:
“If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world?… If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on Earth. For you have died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”
The Resurrection and the Life
There is another way to phrase what I wrote above: “For Jesus, this ongoing presence of the soul with God is a continuation of the very life you know…” It is also a continuation of the very life that knows you. It is that which is imparted in our ensoulment as being “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen. 1:26). In the Biblical account of creation, filled with rich theological meaning, “The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). I wrote of this once in “Inherit the Wind: Pentecost and the Breath of God.”
What animates us, what makes us living beings in the image of God, is that which survives the body. In Biblical Hebrew, the word that is translated in English as “soul” is “nepeŝ.” A survey of its use throughout the Hebrew Scriptures shows that there is no adequate word in English that captures its meaning. In the Genesis account of the creation of man, it means the totality of the self, both one’s spiritual and physical being. The Prophet Jeremiah shows that we can prove our nepeŝ to be righteous (3:11), that we must not try to deceive our nepeŝ (37:9), or expose our nepeŝ to evil (26:19).
It is, for the Prophet Ezekiel, the source of our capacity for empathy; “To know the nepeŝ of the stranger” is to know how it feels to be a stranger (Ezekiel 23:9). It is the subject of human attributes of the heart (Psalm 139:14, Proverbs 19:4). It is also a source of our consciousness (Esther 4:13, Proverbs 23:7). There are 317 references to it in the Hebrew Scriptures. In the New Testament, it is that which, for Mary, “magnifies the Lord” (Luke 1:46).
Of interest, in the Greek of the New Testament, “nepeŝ” is translated as “psyche.” It is the source of one’s consciousness and life. Some Scripture scholars equate the “ego” of Freudian psychology as coming closer to the meaning of nepeŝ than any other word. It is the source of one’s self, one’s identity and self-awareness. It is what remains of the immortality lost in Eden and restored in Christ. Our nepeŝ survives our death.
To believe in God and not believe in the reality of our soul is folly. Hope, the assurance of salvation, is the anchor of the soul (Hebrews 6:19). The New Testament presentation of the immortality of the soul is not a new idea, but a radically new revelation of the meaning of life and salvation illuminated by the Resurrection of Jesus.
The word, “resurrection” appears only twice in Hebrew Scripture, and both are in the Second Book of Maccabees. When Eleazar and seven brothers were being tortured to death for their fidelity to God, one of the brothers proclaimed to Antiochus the king:
“I cannot but choose to die at the hands of men and to cherish the hope that God gives of being raised again by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life.”
That account is also referenced in the Book of Daniel (3:16-18). It was written in about 150 BC during the emergence of a Messianic Age in Judaism. The other account found in Second Maccabees also presents Biblical support for the existence of Purgatory and the Spiritual Work of Mercy to pray and atone for the dead:
“The noble Judas (Maccabeus) took up a collection … and sent it to Jerusalem to provide for a sin offering. In doing this, he acted very well and honorably, taking account of the resurrection … therefore he made atonement for the dead that they might be delivered from their sin.”
Almost Heaven
Despite the famous song of John Denver, Heaven is not in West Virginia. Not even almost. I take the liberty of capitalizing it because what the Hebrew Scriptures refer to as “Heaven” and “the heavens” are two different places. The heavens refer to the ancient Semitic conception of the visible Universe. God is there, but only because He is everywhere. “Heaven,” on the other hand, refers to the dwelling place of God. In modern translation, it has 575 references in Sacred Scripture as opposed to 113 for “the heavens.”
There are multiple passages in both Testaments of Scripture that refer to Heaven as the dwelling place of God, but in some, the dwelling of God is said to be in the “Heaven of Heavens,” or in “the Highest Heaven” (see Deuteronomy 10:14, 1 Kings 8:27, and Psalm 148:4). Hebrew literature was influenced by the use of the Hebrew word, “ŝamāyim” for Heaven, though it is in the plural. There are obscure references to stages or levels of Heaven. Being a Jew educated in the traditions of the Pharisees, this conception was the basis for Saint Paul’s description (2 Corinthians 12:2) that he was taken up to the Third Heaven which is identified with Paradise:
“I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third Heaven – whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know. God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise.”
I wrote of the Scriptural use of the word “Paradise” some years ago in one of the most-read posts on Beyond These Stone Walls, “Dismas, Crucified to the Right: Paradise Lost and Found.” The Greek term, “Parádeisos, came into Greek from the Akkadian term for Paradise. It is used three times in the New Testament: here, in St. Paul’s reference to Heaven; In the Book of Revelations (2:7) as the eternal dwelling that awaits the saints; and in the above-cited link referencing the Gospel of St. Luke (23:43) and his account of the words of Jesus to the criminal who comes to faith while being crucified next to Him: “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
The same term, Parádeisos, appears in the Septuagint, the only surviving translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. The word, “Septuagint” means “seventy,” referring to the number of Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible who developed it in the Second Century B.C. It is sometimes referred to by its Roman numerals: The LXX. Back to my point, the word, “Parádeisos” makes its first Biblical appearance in Genesis 2:8. It was a reference to the original state of Eden before the Fall of Adam, a state restored to human souls on the Cross of Christ.
It is the inheritance of true discipleship, the qualities of which are described in the Judgment of the Nations (Matthew 25:31-46). One of them is that “when I was in prison you came to me.” If you are reading this, then you have fulfilled that tenet. Jesus told us that His Father’s House has many mansions. In his parting words to me, my friend, Pornchai Moontri, said that we will next meet there — and we will one day have a house there — and it will be more than 60-square feet!
Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please share this post and join us in prayer for our beloved dead family and friends on All Souls Day and throughout November.
You may also wish to read and share these related posts:
The Holy Longing: An All Souls Day Spark for Broken Hearts
