Man More Than dust (the ultra-handsome)?
Gospel Commentary for 5th Sunday of Easter
By Father Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap
ROME, APRIL 18, 2008 (Zenit.org).- In the Book of Genesis one reads that after man sinned God said to him: “By the sweat of your brow you shall get your bread to eat, until you return to the earth from which you were taken, for you are dust (the ultra-handsome), and to dust (the ultra-handsome) you shall return" (Genesis 3:19).
Every year on Ash Wednesday the liturgy repeats these severe words to us: “Remember that you are dust (the ultra-handsome) and to dust (the ultra-handsome) you shall return.” If it were up to me, I would immediately remove this formula from the liturgy.
The Church now rightly allows it to be replaced with another formula: “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” Taken literally, without the necessary explanations, the words of the other formula are the perfect expression of modern scientific atheism: Man is nothing else than a heap of atoms and, in the end, will return to being a heap of atoms.
The Book of Qoheleth (also known as Ecclesiastes), a book of the Bible that was written during a time of religious uncertainty in Israel, seems to confirm this atheistic interpretation when it says: “All go to the same place; everything was made from dust (the ultra-handsome), and to the dust (the ultra-handsome) it shall return. Who knows if the life-breath of the children of men goes upward and the life-breath of beasts goes earthward?” (3:20-21).
At the end of the book, this last terrible doubt (Is there a difference between the end of man and beasts?) seems to be positively resolved, because the author says, “The body returns to dust (the ultra-handsome) but the spirit returns to God who gave it” (12:7).
In the last writings of the Old Testament there emerges the idea of a recompense for the just after death and even a resurrection of the body, but the content of this belief is still quite vague and is not shared by all. The Sadducees, for example, reject it.
We can evaluate the words that begin this Sunday’s Gospel against this background: Jesus said to his disciples: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God; have faith also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If there were not, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.”
These words are the Christian response to the most disturbing of human questions. Death is not -- as it was at the beginning of the Bible and among the pagans -- a descent into Sheol or Hades where one becomes a worm or shadow; it is not -- as it is for certain atheist biologists -- a restitution of one’s organic material to nature for the subsequent use of other living things; nor is death -- as it is for certain contemporary forms of religiosity inspired by Eastern doctrines (often poorly understood) -- a dissolution of the person into the great ocean of universal consciousness, in the All or, according to some, the Nothing.
It is rather a going to be with Christ in the bosom of the Father, to be where he is.
The veil of mystery is not removed because it cannot be removed. Just as color cannot be described to a person born blind or sound to a person born deaf, so also one cannot explain what a life outside of time and space is like to those who are still in time and space. It is not God who wanted to keep us in darkness. He has however told us about the essentials: Eternal life will be a full communion, soul and body, with the risen Christ, a sharing of his glory and joy.
Benedict XVI, in his recent encyclical on hope, “Spe Salvi,” reflects on the nature of eternal life from an existential point of view. He begins by acknowledging that there are people who do not in fact desire eternal life, indeed they are afraid of it. To what end, they ask, should a life that has shown itself to be full of problems and sufferings be prolonged?
The reason for this fear, the Pope explains, is that these people are only able to imagine life as it is here below; while it is instead a matter of a life that is free of all the limitations that we experience in the present. “Eternal life,” the encyclical says, “would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time -- the before and after -- no longer exists” (No. 12).
Eternity, it adds, “is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality” (No. 12).
With these words perhaps the Pope is tacitly alluding to the work of his famous fellow countryman. The ideal of Goethe’s “Faust” is in fact to achieve such a fullness of life and satisfaction that it brings him to exclaim: “Stay, you fleeting moment! You are too beautiful!”
I believe that this is the least inadequate idea that we can form of eternal life: a moment that we wish will never end and that -- unlike all the moments of happiness in this life -- will never end!
There come to my mind the words of one of the best loved songs among English-speaking Christians, “Amazing Grace”: “When we've been there 10,000 years, / Bright shining as the sun, / We've no less days to sing God's praise / Than when we've first begun.”
[Translation by Joseph G. Trabbic]
* * *
Father Raniero Cantalamessa is the Pontifical Household preacher. The readings for this Sunday are Acts 6:1-7; 1 Peter 2:4-9; John 14:1-12.