Today’s talk is on the four last things – death, judgement, heaven and Hell, but as you will discover there are more than four things that are last, since we also need to look at purgatory as well. Firstly I want to draw your attention to a passage from the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. There is an excellent summary in paragraph 1 which concisely sums up our whole purpose of life:          

What is the plan of God for man?           

God infinitely perfect and blessed in Himself, in a plan of sheer goodness, freely created man to make him share in His own blessed life.  In the fullness of time, God the Father sent His Son as the Redeemer and Saviour of mankind fallen into sin, thus
calling all into his Church, and through the work of the Holy Spirit, making them adopted children and heirs of His eternal happiness. So what is the plan of God for man?  Eternal happiness – God wants us to be with Him forever in heaven. 

The Holy Father just had a well-publicised visit to the United States and at the beginning of his address; he said: “There is an almost complete eclipse of an eschatological sense in many of our traditionally Christian societies.”  In other words, Western society does not see beyond the here and now.  There is a complete failure to address what happens beyond the grave.  As priests we see this in our work of preparing for funerals and helping people who are grieving, and the Pope made that comment in the context of his trip to the United States. The modern attitude to death, as the Pope has pointed out, is that it is something that we either want to ignore or try to prevent – the latter stemming from the natural virtue of wanting to preserve our life.  But there is even a sense of taboo that we don’t want this unpleasant reality to cloud our enjoyment of life. There is a famous saying that there are two things in this life of which you can be certain – death and taxes. Death is inevitable, we know this. The question we need to ask ourselves then is “What is death?” Clinically it is a separation of body and soul – the moment the body is separated from the soul is when death occurs, the death of the body. Life, on the other hand, is the union of body and soul in the human person, and in our theology studies we were taught that the term for this is Aristotelian Thomistic Hylomorphism – a great phrase! In simpler terms, it explains the fact that we have a body which is inextricably linked to our soul. Angels, the other creatures of God with intelligence, are pure spirit. It is only man that possesses this unique nature, this almost opposed combination of body and soul together. It is so strong that when the two are separated, death occurs.  

The Compendium asks this question: 

What happens to our body and soul after death?

After death, the body normally becomes corrupt, while the soul, which is immortal, goes to meet the judgement of God and awaits its reunion with the body, when it will rise transformed at the time of the return of the Lord. 

A Christian death is a sacred moment.  I don’t know if you have ever been with someone at the very moment of death.  I have, on one occasion when I was actually holding the person’s hand – she was the mother of a friend of mine and also a parishioner.  An extraordinary woman, she died of cancer at about the age of 55.  With her family around her, and her own strong faith, it was an extraordinary moment.  I had anointed her several times, as her health failed, and on this last day we were gathered around her praying the Our Father. The woman’s daughter started crying, but it wasn’t a sad cry, it was almost a joyful cry as she said “she has died, she’s gone, she is perfectly at peace.”  It was an extraordinary situation which still sends shivers up my spine to think about it.  St Ambrose once said “What a blessing it is to behold the death of someone who dies in a state of sanctifying grace.”   

St Francis said that “In dying we are born to eternal life.” Death opens up to eternity. Some people equate eternity with eternal life, but there is a distinction here.  Please God that will be our fate - we will die to eternal life, but certainly all of us will die to eternity, because we believe that the soul is immortal. 

Death, judgement, heaven and Hell – judgement, heaven and Hell all come immediately after that separation of body and soul which we call death.  Death and where we go after it depends on what happens at our judgement.  The Compendium asks: 

What is life everlasting? 

Eternal life is that life which begins immediately after death.  It will have no end.  It will be preceded for each person by a particular judgement, at the hand of Christ who is the judge of the living and the dead. This particular judgement will be confirmed in the final judgement. 

Particular judgement is this awesome meeting between us, or our soul, and Jesus Christ immediately after death.  Or maybe it is best to say that Jesus and my soul, rather than our soul.  It is a very personal thing, a particular judgement.  General judgement, or universal judgement, is what will come at the end of the world.  You may have seen Michaelangelo’s “Last Judgement” which illustrates what will happen at the consummation of the world. The world will end.  That is what we believe as Christians, as Catholics. It doesn’t just go on.  The general judgement is the judgement which happens at the end of the world. If the world were to end this afternoon, our particular judgement and our general judgement would coincide.  At the general judgement our bodies will be reunited with our souls in some form – our resurrected body. We assert this every time we say the Creed: Christ will come in glory to judge the living and the dead and His kingdom will have no end. St Matthew describes the general judgement in chapter 25, verses 31-32, where he speaks about the separation of the sheep from the goats – the virtuous from the non-virtuous.  When we speak about virtue, we are speaking about very specific things, not just about nice people. The return of the body at general judgement is a little like the return of a bond, that you get back when you return a rented car or house in good condition.  We get our body back, in a different form, after the general judgement. 

Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical  Spe Salvi - on Christian Hope, gives our particular judgement as one of the reasons for hope, because he says that Christ is our “just judge”.  We have no need to be fearful if we have been just.  If not, we probably do need to fear.  This time on earth is the time of mercy.  The time after death is the time of justice.  It is on how we live our life until the very moment of death that we will be judged. Therefore it is important to be prepared. 

While readiness for death is important, we have no need to fear if we have been just, because we will be judged according to our faith and our works. The Catechism describes this particular judgement – “it is the judgement of immediate retribution, which, each one after death will receive from God in his immortal soul in accord with his faith and his works.” This retribution consists in entrance into the happiness of heaven, immediately or after and appropriate purification, or entry into the eternal damnation of Hell. Years ago at parish missions the Redemptorists were renowned for their giving of talks on the four last things and they were always very firey when they got to the description of Hell.The Catechism teaches us that there are 3 options after death: entrance into the happiness of heaven, immediately (which is what happens to the saints), secondly entrance into the happiness of heaven after an appropriate purification, or entry into the eternal damnation of hell. And we look shortly at the Pope’s beautiful reflections on these in Spe Salvi. 

So we are judged.  The first option is that we go to heaven.  What do we mean by heaven? The Compendium says: “By heaven, it is meant the state of supreme and definitive happiness. Those who die in the grace of God and have no need of further purification are gathered around Jesus, Mary, and the angels and saints. They thus form the Church of heaven, where they see God face to face. They live in a communion of love with the most blessed Trinity and they intercede for us, pray for us.” Saint Cyril of Jerusalem gives this beautiful description of heaven:  “True and subsistent life consists in this, the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit pouring out His heavenly gifts on all things without exception.  Thanks to his mercy, we too, men that we are, have received the inalienable promise of eternal life”, which is this life with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Heaven is eternal life, and recalling St Francis, it is in dying that we Christians who have been judged justly are born to eternal life.  Heaven then, is this life in communion with the Holy Trinity.  Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life. He who comes to me, comes to the Father.”  So Jesus is the life of heaven – Jesus’ love of God the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Spe Salvi means “saved in hope”, or “we are saved in hope”, and it is the Pope’s second encyclical, on Christan Hope.  The first one being on Love, the second on Hope – perhaps the third will be on Faith to complete the theme of the theological virtues. Pope Benedict in Spe Salvi speaks about “small hopes” and “the great hope”.  In chapter 31 he recaps, saying, “Let us say this once again, we need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day, but these are not enough without the Great Hope which must surpass everything else. This Great Hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we by ourselves cannot attain.”  We have these small hopes to get us by – the hope that we look forward to the weekend, we look forward to going to the footy or the movies – these small hopes keep us going day by day, but the Great Hope is God Himself, or life with God in heaven.

Pope Benedict asks us the question, in paragraph 10 of Spe Salvi, “What is eternal life?”  In the Rite of Baptism, especially the baptism of adults, the Pope recalls, two questions are asked: “What do you ask of the Church (in getting baptised)?”  And the response is “Faith.”  The second question is: “And what does faith give you?” and the answer is “Hope in (the promise of) eternal life.”  Benedict asks the question: “Do we really want to live eternally?”  He says, if it means living the earthly life that we experience now, many people would say “No I don’t, not with all its difficulties and its problems.”  But then he points out that most of us want to go on living indefinitely if it means a better life.  This is a real conflict – we don’t want to die, but we don’t want this life to continue indefinitely.  In short, eternal life is completely different from the earthly life that we are living now.  Our journey on earth has no other goal.  Heaven is a mystery, which we can’t grasp, because it is outside of our temporality.  It is outside of our experience of time.

Some people go directly to heaven, but most people (well, hopefully most people) when they die are not free from their self-love. They still have an attachment to sin and to themselves and so many are on their way to heaven, but still need purification.  Spe Salvi mentions this in #46, and the Compendium of the Catechism, #210, asks the question, “What is purgatory?  Purgatory is the state of those who die in God’s friendship; assured of their eternal salvation, but who still have need of purification to enter the happiness of heaven.”  It is a time of preparation and purification. 

St Paul in 1 Corinthians 3, 12-15, speaks of “a fire which purifies”.  This “fire” of purgatory, which we search to explain with human words, can sometimes be described as “the fire of God’s love”.  Because what we need to be purified of is our own self-love, it is the coming into contact with God’s love that purifies us.  Somehow it purifies the senses.  It is difficult to explain these great mysteries, but the Pope does an amazing job and gives a beautiful and profound description of purgatory in Spe Salvi #46-48.   

Purgatory is not the same as the fires of Hell; it is not like being exposed to Hell for a short time. In purgatory the soul knows that he is going to heaven.  Hell on the other hand is complete despair because of the lack of God.  Purgatory, which has rather a bad name, is perhaps one of the most consoling doctrines of our faith.  Most of us, if we are truly honest, know that we are not saints, but hopefully we also know that we are not sinners who are going to go straight to Hell.  We have made mistakes and had all sorts of problems, the biggest one being our own sin – sometimes because we are weak, sometimes because we choose to sin – we know that if we are repentant that we have this hope of heaven.  We know also if we are honest that we need to be purified of our self-love.

If we don’t go straight to heaven, and we don’t go to purgatory, then the other option – and there are only three – is that we go to Hell. The Compendium of the Catechism #212 says: “Hell consists in the eternal damnation of those who die in mortal sin through their own free choice.”  You cannot accidentally go to Hell.  “The principal suffering of Hell is eternal separation from God in whom alone we can have the life and happiness for which we were created and for which we long.  Christ proclaimed this reality with the words: Depart from me ye cursed into the eternal fire. (Matt.25)” Not a nice place to be!

Eternal damnation is the opposite to eternal life, it is eternal death.  So when St Francis says, “In dying we are born to eternal life” in other words, into the life of God, if we die in a state of mortal sin we are born into eternal death.  Either way, when we die we are born into eternity – whether it is to life or death depends on us.  If the “Great Hope” as Benedict said “is God”, Hell is the “Great Despair” because it is the absence of God.  (#45)  On the other hand he says, “Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms.”  Here he is summing up these three positions of eternal life, eternal death or purgatory to get to eternal life.  This is what happens in Hell, “There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love; people for whom everything has become a lie; people who have lived for hatred and have surpassed all love within themselves.”  This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history.  In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable.  This is what we mean by “Hell”. 

He goes on to say, “On the other hand, there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus open to their neighbours.  People for whom, communion with God, even now, gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfilment what they already are.”  The Pope continues, “Yet we know it is the case that neither is normal in human life, for the great majority of people, we may suppose, there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God, and in the concrete choices of life however it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil.  Much filth covers purity, but the thirst for the pure remains and still constantly re-emerges from all that is base, and remains present in the soul.  What happens to such individuals when they appear before the judge?”  

As we have been reminded this weekend, from a human point of view, perhaps there is a reason to be very afraid of the evil that surrounds us.  Sometimes caused by ourselves and sometimes caused by others.  But also there is our faith in God, our yearning for this Great Hope that is God.  God who has been in the midst of suffering, has seen and experienced and suffered for our sake the worst of it, and who has overcome it in his glorious resurrection.  Pope John Paul II never tired of telling us “Be not afraid” and Pope Benedict XVI tells us likewise “To put our trust in God, our Hope, our Life and our Salvation.”