Link to today’s Mass Readings: Monday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time | USCCB
As I mentioned in one of the reflections from last week, here we find an excellent example of Paul (and the Christian community) “doing theology”. That is, bringing the reality of the Christ-event into dialogue with the current experience of believers, and allowing that to inform and transform that experience in Christ.
Here we find Paul drawing attention to the difference between the Christian experience of grief, and the pagan experience of grief (as understood at the time). Paul’s opening sentence “We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters”[1] really has the impact of saying: Let me clear a few things up for you, because how we (the Christian community) understand this circumstance is quite different from those around us. For those of you (too) familiar with Friday evenings at Year 8 Debating this is similar to the 2nd Speaker for the Affirmative saying: The Opposition has told you X, but they are idiots and they are wrong.[2]
The great difference here for St Paul, and so for us, is that our grief is experienced in the bedrock of ‘hope’. It does not mean that our experience of loss does not bring pain and grief, or that our experience of loss is not unsettling and bewildering (at times), but that this grief and loss is not accompanied by the thought that this is all there is; that this is the end.
I remember Phillip Adams commenting that he found the thought of his daughters or wife dying unbearable to him, because as an atheist their death meant the annihilation of their being. They wouldn’t be going somewhere else where one day he would be with them, there would be no sense of “until we meet again” – they would simply cease to exist.[3] It is in contrast to this unspeakable grief that St Paul writes of the Christian experience; the Christian experiences grief in the context of the hope of the resurrection.
Let us commend to God all those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith, particularly those who have no-one to remember them:
Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.
May their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through your mercy rest in peace and rise in glory.
[1] Other translations put this a little more forcefully: “But we do not want you to be uninformed” (New Oxford Annotated Bible”, or, “Now we do not want you to be in ignorance, brothers and sisters” (Richard, E.J. (1995). Sacra Pagina: First and Second Thessalonians. (D.J. Harrington, Ed.). The Liturgical Press.
[2] And “yes”, I have adjudicated debates where the Opposition were referred to as idiots.
[3] This comment was made at a debate at Sydney University in the early 2000s. I cannot remember whether Phillip Adams was in discussion with Cardinal George Pell around the topic of whether atheists could be moral people, or whether Mr Adams was chairing the discussion.
