I have had to recite the Office of the Dead rather frequently in the past year, as well as offering comfort to friends who have lost a loved one. I have found that for the most part North Americans have a matter/spirit dualist spirituality, where matter is the transient and where spirit is the eternal. When we die, in a system like this, the consciousness goes with the spirit to exist forever with God, or as some subsystems teach, to languish in some sort of hell or dim netherworld. Many Christians even hold this view...even though that is not orthodox Christian teaching. Empiricists, on the other hand, believe that when one dies the person is no more. The universe itself, ever expanding, will some day (WAY in the future, billions times billions time billions of years...you get the picture) run out of energy and everything just slump as entropy wins and it all shuts down.
Cheery.
Orthodox teaching of the Church catholic however states that God, who is separate from Creation and Who actually OWNS Creation, has the power to remake Creation and in doing so expel entropy, which in theological terms is called death or corruption. Holding this view, and based on revelation from the Prophets and from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Church holds that humanity will rise from the dead, physically, but no longer be subject to corruption.
Okay, much less glum.
Our readings today (please check them out here and see "Track 2") at Mass go over these "last things" as part of our eschatology (the official term for the study of "last things"). In the Gospel, our Lord tells us not only about the fall of the Temple at the hands of the Romans, but the fall of everything and that many will offer themselves up as Jesus Returned or the Messiah...accept no substitutes, there is a lot more rough stuff to come before He comes back. In the Epistle, the writer tells us that Jesus is now in the eternal dimension outside Creation, until His enemies are subjected to Him (the last enemy being Entropy/Death/Corruption). In the book of the Prophet Daniel, we read that we shall all be delivered and raised to incorruption.
It is not enough, however, in proper Christian thought, to rest solitary on our laurels, contemplating that last day. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us that because of this hope, because of this promise of things to come, we are to provoke each other to good deeds and acts of mercy. We must do that by meeting together, encouraging each other, supporting each other. The Life in Christ is Life in the Church...the messy, disorganized, aggravating by times Life in the Church, where we are supposed to hammer each other into visions and images of Christ, fit at the Last Day to be raised. This way we lead others to righteousness in Christ, and to Life Eternal.
That is our hope. Let's provoke each other to acts of mercy, alright?
Christ in Glory, Mosaic, 6th Century A.D., Church of Sant' Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy