Eternal life

THE belief in immortality is not peculiar to Christianity. Egyptians mummified the dead because they believed a well-preserved body to be crucial to life after death. It was not annihilation that the ancient Hindus feared. It was rather the senseless cycle of birth and rebirth from which they sought liberation. Buddhists, for their part, sought to banish the dread of death by holding to the tenet of "no-self": There is no such thing as an enduring self, "no soul," some put it, and that the ultimate happiness was not the joy of life in a world to come but the release from all illusion and grasping after what never endures. Christianity is unique in that it takes death with utmost seriousness and rejects all illusions about it. And this is because central to the Christian’s theology of death is the saving death of Jesus Christ. The Son of God did not appear to die. He died. Death broke him, and when we profess in the Creed that “he descended into hell,” we are, in fact, saying that the cross cast him into the farthest reaches of mortality — the ultimate depth from which all hope of human retrieval is for nought! Jesus’ death is not some adventitious episode to an otherwise glorious story of God’s Son. It is at the very heart of who he was. The Cross is indeed the crux of redemption because Jesus’ death was so real that, to this day, many reject it as a tall tale. For the Christian, death is the sting of that human frailty, that vulnerability immortalized in the story of the Fall from Eden. There certainly is condemnation in death: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” And in that lies the redemptive character of Jesus’ death — for if the Son of God, as a consequence of that self-emptying by which we have become full, drank the cup of human mortality to its dregs and “descended into hell,” then death too was transformed by the love of the God who is Life, and from whose hand, no one can be snatched away! We will all know the pain and the bitterness of death. Even now, as we visit the tombs and graves where lie the remains of our loved ones, we are filled with the longing for their company that we know is past, and never to return. Thus, does the Christian acknowledge the definitiveness of death and the fact that when it does happen, all human bonds are sundered. All we have left are memories that, given the dreadfully corrosive force of time, fade as years pass. In fact, it occurred to me as I visited the memorial park today that, being a priest and having no children, when I die, my brother and sister will probably mourn me for a while — but soon, my grave will just be like the many I now see and lament — overgrowth with shrubbery and thickets, forgotten and even trampled upon by persons on their way to the graves of those they still remember! Unlike other concepts of immortality, it is not owing to anything innate in us that we look forward “to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” There is nothing in human nature that makes the Resurrection a foregone conclusion. While scholastic philosophy has argued for a “subsistent rational soul,” what our faith promises us are resurrection and eternal life, and at the center of this promise, as its guarantee as well as its sign, is the Risen Lord. No, Jesus did not return from the grave to resume the earthly transactions left off with his crucifixion. What rather happened because of Easter was to make the grave the beginning of an experience of “what eye has not seen, nor has ear heard, nor has it occurred to anyone.” And that is why the stories of the encounters with the Risen Lord do not have any coherence because they are attempts at professing faith in that of which we have utterly no experience. But that does not mean that our faith in eternal life is vacuous, that Risen Life is in fact a cipher, a pathetic projection of our longing for immortality. Rather, what we have received is a promise, and what the Gospels leave us are hints, intimations of future glory that the liturgy of the Church celebrates. But only they who are willing to accept the reality and finality of the death of Jesus, God’s Son, and our death as inscribed into what we are, are open to the absolute surprise of the Resurrection that is our absolute hope! Fr. Rannie Aquino is dean of the Graduate School of Law at San Beda College-Mendiola. rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph