Jesus said, “…he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life…has passed from death to life” (RSV Catholic edition, John 5:24)

Is life after death just wishful thinking or are there any real grounds for believing in it?  The Christian finds the answer to that question in the only quarter where it is to be found, and that is in the character of God who made us. For it is he who is the Giver of life whether in this life or in the next.  We have received our present life from him as his gift.  The question is, therefore, will God – does God – use death as the occasion and the means of cancelling that gift?

To the Christian such a thought is inconceivable, because God is a God of love, unchanging and everlasting love; and being what he is, he could not allow those who are the object of his love to perish.  On the contrary, he must continue to cherish them not for three score years and ten, but for ever.

Christians are also confirmed in their belief in life after death when they reflect on the sublime proof which God has given of his love, by coming into this world and suffering crucifixion that we might be for ever his.

Two quotations from St John’s Gospel are enough.  Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd.  The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep…My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand.  My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand” (RSV Catholic edition, John 10:11. 27-29).

And the other quotation: “…God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (RSV Catholic edition, John 3:16).

So for Christians, belief in a future life stems from their belief in a God of love.  Christians know that when they die they are not fit to share God’s life to the full.  But they believe that in Paradise, that intermediate state into which the soul passes at death, they will be cleansed from all their sins until they are able at last to receive the reward of the pure in heart, which is to see God.  And that is Heaven.

It is important to notice that Our Lord is not concerned with survival after death but with life after death, and the two are very different things.  Survival can be a mere existence; but life connotes joy and vigour.  And the eternal life which Our Lord promises is nothing less than life with him, and the quality of that life is described in the New Testament as glory – a life that shares in the revealed splendour of the God of love.

Eternal life, therefore, is a living personal relationship with God which is also everlasting because God himself is everlasting.  But for that very reason it overlaps both this life and the next; and physical death is merely a natural incident which does not interrupt the continuity of that relationship, but only marks a change of environment from this world to the next.

Our Lord made that truth plain by speaking of eternal life, not only as a future state in the next life, but as a present possession already in this one.  “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life…”.  And then Jesus added, he “has passed from death to life” (RSV Catholic edition, John 5:24, our emphasis).

It is clear that the death to which Jesus was referring has nothing to do with physical death.  On the contrary, it was the word which he used – and it was the strongest word he could find – to describe the state of a human being who does not share God’s life because he does not have that living personal relationship with him which is eternal life, whether here or hereafter.

The absence of such a relationship is marked by the dominance of one’s lower self with its well-known manifestations against which St Paul has warned us: impurity, foul talk, troublemaking, covetousness, lying, anger, enmity, hatred, malice and slander (see Galatians 5:19-21; Ephesians 5:3; Colossians 3:5-9).

And eternal life cannot begin until one’s lower self, and all those evil things which stream out of it, have been given the death blow by a repentance that really means business; that is, the positive action of turning away from those things by deliberately turning to God.

And the fruit of that new life, of that new relationship, is altogether different: “…love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control…” (RSV Catholic edition, Galatians 5:22).

That is the beginning here and now of eternal life – the dealing of a mortal blow at one’s lower self with all its unChristlike features, and the sharing of one’s life with the Risen Christ.  As St Paul wrote to his flock, “…you…must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus”.  “For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God” (RSV Catholic edition, Romans 6:11; Colossians 3:3).

A man once asked Our Lord to tell him what he should do to inherit eternal life.  And the answer which Our Lord gave was to love God with the whole of one’s being and to love one’s neighbour as oneself.

But for all that, eternal life still remains the free gift of God in Christ Jesus Our Lord.  It is not – and cannot be – a thing that anyone can earn, because, although eternal life is the sharing of our life with God, it is also first and foremost the sharing by God of his life with us.  That is something which we can never deserve, but only accept with gratitude and wonder.

The death of the body, therefore, has in the last analysis been made irrelevant by the Risen Christ.  For physical death is a factor in eternal life only in so far as it will be finally conquered in the resurrection of the dead in which we profess our belief in the Creed.

For human beings are a unity of body and soul, and therefore when physical death renders them disembodied souls, they are to that extent incomplete human beings.  But that incompleteness, that broken unity, will be made good by God who will clothe the soul with a supernatural body, perfectly fitted to enable the person, body and soul, to live to the full that glorious supernatural life which the Risen Christ himself enjoys and to share it with him.

Such then is the Christian faith and the Christian hope.  In St Paul’s words, “…this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality…then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

‘Death is swallowed up in victory’.
‘O death, where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting?’
The sting of death is sin…But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (RSV Catholic edition, 1 Corinthians 15:53-57).