At
that time your people shall be delivered
The
whole month of November, beginning as it does with All Saints and All Souls,
is in some places dedicated to prayer for the holy souls departed. Every day
that is a feria, i.e. not a feast day, a Requiem Mass is said. At the very
least we should be sure that prayer for the dead is part of our daily prayers
in this month. Of course the departed should always be included in our
prayers all the time. If it is not, then this month is a good time to start. Otherwise you are neglecting a vast number of souls
that God has given you the responsibility of praying for.
This
is, I think, the reason that we have the reading from the Prophet Daniel right
in the middle of this month. The
Book of Daniel is something of an unread book in the lectionary for Sunday
Mass and feast days. We hear a reading from Daniel only five times in the three
year cycle of readings and it is probably not at the top of our list of favorite
books of the Bible for devotional reading. The first half of it has really great stories and is easy to read: it is all about Daniel and the Babylonian King
Nebuchadnezzar and the interpretation of the King’s dream. The strange words: mene, mene, tekel, parsin. The second half consists
of Daniel’s visions of God and is a bit harder read.
But
the reading this Sunday comes from the final chapter of Daniel. This bit of
Daniel is one of the readings which can be used at a Requiem Mass. The reason
for that is it records a dramatic shift in Jewish thinking about
life-after-death. It is sometimes said that the Jews early on did not believe
in an after-life but it seems more accurate to say that they simply did not pay
it much mind. The here and now was what concerned them. In any case today’s
reading is the earliest, unmistakable reference to the resurrection of the dead
in the Old Testament.
In fact we can recognize a great deal in this
reading from Daniel that both influenced and anticipated the Christian
understanding of the resurrection of the dead.
First
of all, St. Michael the Archangel, the great prince who has charge of the
people, appears. So he does as well in
the traditional Mass for the dead in the offertory verse:
O Lord Jesus Christ, King
of Majesty, deliver the souls of all the faithful departed from the hand of
hell, . . . but let Michael, the holy
standard-bearer, make speed to restore them to the brightness of glory.
Only
God can raise the dead but by His design and command angels and men are also
part of the resurrection of
the dead. Because the Offertory goes on:
Sacrifice and prayer do we
offer to thee, O Lord: do thou accept them for the souls departed.
This
is a great mystery to be sure. We are not told how to calculate the exact way
in which our prayers help the dead. But we realize that, if it is only with the protection of the
angels and the strength of the prayers of others that we get through this world, then it will be also be only with the same
protection and prayers that we will get into the world to come.
Secondly,
the resurrection of the dead involves judgment by God: ‘some will awake to
eternal life and some to everlasting contempt’. We are told so often that we
must not judge that we begin to imagine that God himself will not judge. It is
true that God judges and not us but what we do have to do is to choose. The
problem with life here and now is not simply that we are always having to
choose between good and evil. If that were true, then it would just be a choice
between good and nothing, evil being not something but the absence of something,
namely the good. The difficulty is that we have to choose between good and
good. But the judgement of God consists of the choice between the capital "G" Good, the
Goodness which is God Himself, both the source of all goodness and surpassing all goodness
and our own idea of the good. I do not
know how this goes yet before the Almighty, but I do know that I have the nasty habit of choosing
my idea of the good over the Goodness, which is God. I suspect that I am not alone in this. It is all a matter
of habits and the more practice we get choosing the ultimate Good over the immediate good,
then easier it will be, when eternity hangs in the balance.
Finally,
the resurrection of the dead is understood in the Book of Daniel not as a mere resuscitation
but as a transformation. “Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of
the firmament; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars for
ever and ever.” Human death is such a
physical thing: the drop of blood pressure, pulse, pulmonary failure, cardiac
failure, then nothing. What we want at
that moment is for all the physical functions to restart. We cannot help it. But
what we should really want is that the person who has died, the one whom we
have loved and continue to love, should be changed, transformed, that the gravity
of sin should not continue to pull them down, that they should arise and shine like
stars.’
This
is not possible within the confines of the Old Testament but only when the Lord
himself has conquered death by death, the tree of disobedience by the Tree of
the Cross, the gates of hell breached by the Captain of our salvation. But we
see already in the prophecy of Daniel what is is to be longed for, from a long distance we can behold the
‘brightness’ of the Lord’s resurrection and surrounding him those 'shining like the brightness of the firmament, like the stars for ever and ever.'
Of
your charity pray for the holy souls.
At
that time your people shall be delivered.
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