Robert Barron - What Happens After We Die?
Peace be with you. Friends, last week we looked at the twentieth chapter of Saint John's Gospel, one of the great Resurrection appearances. And this week, on the Third Sunday of Easter, we have a passage from that magnificent twenty-fourth chapter of Luke. That includes the road to Emmaus story. It's been called the sort of masterpiece within the masterpiece. Chapter 24 is just incomparably rich. And the story for today opens up with the two disciples, having encountered the Lord and come to know him in the breaking of the bread, they've now made their way back to Jerusalem, and they've found the Eleven, and they tell them the great news.
And then, listen: "While they were still speaking about this, he", Jesus, "stood in their midst and said to them, 'Peace be with you.'" So, we saw this last week, didn't we? The risen Christ appears always on his own terms in his own way. We have to avoid the Thomas temptation: "Unless I see, unless I verify, unless things happen on my terms". Well, that's not the right attitude of faith. That's trying to manipulate the experience. No, no. The risen Christ always comes as a grace on his terms. "They were startled and terrified and they thought they were seeing a ghost. But he said to them, 'Why are you troubled? Why do questions arise in your heart? Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.'"
There's again that motif we saw last week. Jesus says, "Shalom". But he also shows his wounds. Don't forget what the sin of the world has done. Don't forget resistance to Christ. But that resistance is overcome by the ever greater shalom of the Lord. Then listen now as he presses on: "Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see that I have". Now what I want to do, everybody, is pause here because as I mentioned last week when we're talking about the Resurrection, we're talking about the central point of Christian faith, the hinge upon which the whole of Christianity turns.
So to understand what we're dealing with here is exceptionally important. Go back to this time and place. Go back to the eastern Mediterranean, first century. There were a lot of views floating around about what happens to us when we die. So stay first in a Jewish context. There are lots and lots of texts in the Old Testament, and this became a standard view for many Jews, that when we die, we die. We simply go back into the dust of the earth. Dust and to dust you shall return. Think of the Psalmist, who says, "Lord, can the dust give you praise"? He's saying, "Look, keep me alive. Now that I'm alive, I can praise you, but once I'm dead, I just return to dust".
So one view is that this life is it. That's all there is. We die and we die like any other animal. Another view within a Jewish context, you can see it in a lot of texts in the Old Testament, is that the dead go to a shadowy place called Sheol. No one wants to go to Sheol. No one is looking forward to it. It's not some place of fulfillment and peace. It's a kind of shadowy half-life. A bit here, if you look in the ancient Greek stories and myths, read the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey".
When the great heroes are doing their work here on earth, well, that's when they're in the bright light of the sun and people can see what they do and can praise them. When they die, they go into a similar kind of shadowy underworld. They're around, but they're not in the bright light of fame. They're not living life in the full sense. So that idea was also floating around in Jesus' time. A third view, and you could see it for example, in the Pharisees. The Sadducees were the ones who said, "No, no, when you die, that's it. You just go into the ground and that's it". But the Pharisees said, "No, no, we believe in the resurrection of the righteous at the end of time".
The idea here is that people die and then eventually at the close of the age, at the end of time, the righteous dead will come back to life. That view was also around at the time of Jesus. And then broaden the perspective out. Look in the Greek and Roman world. You read the texts of Plato and you find a view that, it's very interesting to me, is very common today. In fact, I think even a lot of Christians, if you scratch the surface of their belief, they're going to come up with kind of a Greek idea. Which is this: that the soul, the spirit, is kind of buried inside the body. Plato says it's imprisoned there. And the whole point of the philosophical life and the spiritual life is to effect a kind of prison break. The soul can finally escape from the restrictions of the body and then it can live on in this purely spiritual realm.
As I say, I think a lot of even Bible-believing people think of heaven that way, that I've somehow just left the body behind and now my soul goes on. You see that in Roman mythology, and even in Roman public life, there was a view that some great heroes, like the generals and the emperors, after they die, would go up to the heavenly realm, live with the gods on Mount Olympus. There's a famous story about the Emperor Vespasian on his deathbed, and he senses death coming. And he says to one of the people, "Well, I think I'm becoming a god". So that was a Roman view, not unlike the Greek view, that after we die, the soul escapes from the body.
Now here's the interesting thing, everybody, and I want you to listen carefully because this is the hinge idea. If Christ has not been raised, we're still in our sins. If Christ has not been raised, we're the most pitiable of people. So this is the hinge idea of Christianity. Notice, please, how none of these things that I've described is on offer here. So clearly not saying that Jesus died and then just went back into the dust of the earth. No, I mean, clearly not. They're talking about Jesus risen from the dead. They're not talking about Sheol at all. They're not saying, "Oh yeah, Jesus died and he went to Sheol. And maybe his ghost kind of came up from Sheol".
Remember that story, it's in 2 Samuel, about the witch of Endor who calls forth the shade of the prophet Samuel, calls him up from Sheol. This is exactly why in the story they think they're seeing a ghost. So they're operating out of that perspective like, "Oh, maybe this is a ghost come up from Sheol". But that's not what's being described. Nor are we talking about, "Oh yeah, when all the righteous dead come to life at the end of time". Now this isn't the end of time, this is in the middle of time. This happened to them around the year 30 AD. It happened in this identifiable place. They're clearly not talking about Jesus' soul escaping from his body and going up to heaven. They're not talking about Jesus becoming a god like Vespasian the Roman emperor.
You see the point? None of the typical ways of understanding life after death is on offer here. What are they saying? This Jesus, whom they knew, this particular Christ, whom they saw crucified, and you know, there's this old theory goes back to the nineteenth century that maybe he didn't really die on the cross, he just swooned. Come on. The Romans were expert at putting people to death. And this is not someone who's staggering into their presence barely alive. No, no. This Jesus whom they saw crucified appears to them alive. A ghost from Sheol? No. He says it. I mean, does a ghost have flesh and bones as you see I have?
"'Touch me and see, a ghost doesn't have flesh and bones.' As he said this, he showed them his hands and his feet". We're not talking about some ghostly presence or up there somewhere in heaven. No, no. This is the Jesus whom they knew. And then I love this detail because it's funny. "While they were still incredulous for joy," beautiful phrase, isn't it? They were just so overjoyed that they could barely believe it. He says, "Anything here to eat"? Just to emphasize the fact. And then they give him, we hear, a piece of baked fish and he ate it in front of them. Remember that line from the Acts of the Apostles, when St.Peter says, "We who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead".
That line always strikes me because it's so visceral, it's so real. We who sat down and ate and drank with him. This is someone now appearing alive again in his body. Now mind you, just like anybody else? Well, no, clearly. Because as they were talking among themselves, suddenly Jesus appears in their midst. On the road to Emmaus, there he is with them, and then he disappears. Is there something strange and elusive about his appearance? Yeah. How fascinating, too, that very often in these accounts they don't know for sure that it's Jesus. Remember that? And you think unless that had really happened to them, they would've eliminated that from their account. They wouldn't have talked about that.
I think that's a very vivid memory that he was so transfigured. Even as he appears really to them in his body, he's still so transfigured that it took them a while to understand. Think of the story of the Transfiguration. It's Jesus, yes, the Jesus whom they knew, but now metamorphosed, now elevated, now becoming dazzlingly white. He's on the event horizon, if I can put it that way. He's on the event horizon between this world and the world to come. And, everybody, this gives us, I think, a keen sense of what our hope is.
Christian hope is not, "Hey, I live this world and that's all I got". No, no, no, no, no. We long for this fulfillment in heaven. Christian hope is not, "I go down to shadowy Sheol". No, no. That I come to a fullness of transfigured life, yes, in my body, but now elevated and rendered luminous and perfect. Not escaping from the body and going up to some spiritual realm. No. We look, don't we say, for the resurrection of the dead, we await the resurrection of the body. That's our creedal language. Not the escape of the soul from the body. No, the elevation and transfiguration of the body.
Think about this, everyone. Go back to the beginning of the Bible, and we have God creating the whole material order in all of its beauty and variegated complexity. Do you think God just wants all that to just fade away? He's done all that and it amounts to nothing? The whole idea is to escape from all that? No, no. "I'm creating a new heavens and a new earth". God wants to renew all of creation. He wants to renew the material order. All of that is implied and contained in this idea of the resurrection. St.Paul talks about the spiritual body. That's his way of gesturing toward this paradoxical reality. Paul, mind you, who saw him, Paul, who was the enemy of the faith, persecuting it, and then his whole life is changed because he met him. He met him on the road to Damascus.
This is what we're talking about, everybody, this Jesus, in his body, bearing his wounds, eating and drinking before them, and yet transfigured and elevated to a higher pitch. This is what we celebrate during this Easter season. You know, I'll close with this. I think one way to move spiritually through the Easter season is to cultivate your capacity for surprise. What God has in store for us, it's not nothing, not going back to the dust of the earth. It's not the soul leaving the body behind. No, no. "Eye has not seen, ear has not heard what God has planned for those who love him". Cultivate your capacity for surprise. Cultivate your capacity to imagine a spiritual body. That's at the heart of Christian hope. That's at the heart of our Easter season. And God bless you.