Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women.
The parade of the sacraments continues today. If last Sunday we looked at the arch-sacrament, the Church, the Body of Christ, this week we look at how it operates, which is also the indication of its vitality and health. We know a body is alive and healthy if he functions as a body naturally works. When a body is inert we think it is dead, or at least extremely sick. It is no less true of the Church, the Body of Christ. And the Church does nothing, it is the members of the Church that actually carry out its work; in other words, you and I.
This week we look at the works of service. The epistle, taken from the Acts of the Apostles, tells us of a practical problem in the infant Church, and how the apostles provided a remedy with the institution of the deaconate. In the Gospel we heard the story of the burial of Christ and the manifestation of the resurrection with the empty tomb on Easter. Being the paschal season, a story of the resurrection should be no surprise, but why repeat the story in which the body of Jesus is taken from the cross and buried? We might miss the reason today because we have changed the way Catholics look at, and count, the sacraments. In the first millennium of the Church, funerals were thought to be sacraments and, even if we Catholics no longer count funerals as sacraments, they still play a critical role in the lives of people, both the deceased and the survivors.
To really appreciate the model presented in the Gospel today for caring for the dead, we need to think of how the ancient world considered funeral rites. Jews pray for the dead in every synagogue service, and we continue to pray for the dead in every Eucharistic Liturgy. This might say more than we realize at first. But even the pagans, in the ancient world, considered a lack of proper burial a real catastrophe and, worse, the lack of proper funeral prayers a real disaster. If the pagans felt like that, it was no wonder that prayers for the dead were so very important in the Church of the first millennium. In fact, the great Church father Tertullian (who died in 230AD) quipped that ”a widow who doesn’t pray for her departed husband has divorced him!”
I am afraid that we, as a contemporary American society, are losing a sense of our relationship with the dead and our obligations toward them. I watch advertisements on television in which funeral directors speak of “celebrating a life,” and they don’t mean the one to come. It is all a combination of promoting happy memories, and nothing more; with minimizing the grief, and the grief work, that should accompany a death.
And all this is more than simply discharging an obligation of love toward one who has preceded us in death. It is a simple fact arising from the reality that we Christians live in two words, or two dimensions, at the same time. At the Eucharist the divide between this world and the next melts, and we stand for a little while in that other world, a world of angels and departed spirits. We have one foot in this material world, and the other in the kingdom of God! The dead are not far from us. We are in a position to lend them our support and assistance, and we in turn can benefit from their prayers.
Praying for the dead is so important to us that we have five Saturdays set aside for their remembrance in a special way: four before and during Lent, and the fifth—and perhaps most important—on the vigil of Pentecost! So in this paschal season let be more generous with our prayers for the dead, and not simply for those we knew in this world. Let us be generous with prayers for those who died unburied through the neglect of others, or who were buried without prayers and rites due to the indifference of others, or those who died in circumstances so dire that there was no one left to mourn for them. Let us be generous with out prayers for them now, that they might be generous in turn with us.