I have often been asked, “Why do Catholics pray for the dead?” Sometimes I answer: “We don’t pray for the dead, we pray for the living.”
Am I merely playing with words, or far worse, avoiding the reality of death--the way our culture usually avoids the reality of death? Not at all. When a creature dies, he or she dies. When a human being dies, our bodies die. But does that mean that human beings enter a state of death? Surely the body “lies in death,” and so it is fittingly buried in the ground: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust....”
Return to the question: “Why pray for the dead?
After all, are they not `dead and gone’?” Remember in the Gospels when Sadducees, who believed that “when you are dead you are dead,” tried to trap Jesus in a clever question about “resurrection,” and “whose wife would she be in the resurrection?” They thought that they were being so clever, and making a fool of Jesus. He turned the tables on them, and gave what I consider the most brilliant interpretation of a Scriptural passage I have ever read (drawing from both Mark 12:24-27 and Luke 20:34-38):
“Is not this why you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?... The children of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither mary nor are given in marriage. For they cannot die any more, because they equal to angels and are sons of God, being children of the resurrection. And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses [Exodus], in the passage about the bush, how God said to Moses, `I AM the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living; for all are alive to Him.”
The ones whom we unthinkingly call “dead” are indeed “alive to God.” And that is what matters. So we pray to God for them, as we pray for one another with thanksgiving: That we will grow forever in our love and knowledge of God, and that “God will be all in all” (I Corinthians 15).
Am I merely playing with words, or far worse, avoiding the reality of death--the way our culture usually avoids the reality of death? Not at all. When a creature dies, he or she dies. When a human being dies, our bodies die. But does that mean that human beings enter a state of death? Surely the body “lies in death,” and so it is fittingly buried in the ground: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust....”
Return to the question: “Why pray for the dead?
After all, are they not `dead and gone’?” Remember in the Gospels when Sadducees, who believed that “when you are dead you are dead,” tried to trap Jesus in a clever question about “resurrection,” and “whose wife would she be in the resurrection?” They thought that they were being so clever, and making a fool of Jesus. He turned the tables on them, and gave what I consider the most brilliant interpretation of a Scriptural passage I have ever read (drawing from both Mark 12:24-27 and Luke 20:34-38):
“Is not this why you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?... The children of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither mary nor are given in marriage. For they cannot die any more, because they equal to angels and are sons of God, being children of the resurrection. And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses [Exodus], in the passage about the bush, how God said to Moses, `I AM the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living; for all are alive to Him.”
The ones whom we unthinkingly call “dead” are indeed “alive to God.” And that is what matters. So we pray to God for them, as we pray for one another with thanksgiving: That we will grow forever in our love and knowledge of God, and that “God will be all in all” (I Corinthians 15).
