Death Judgment

EWTN, Global Catholic Radio, and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on phonograph records in the 1960s, and the sound quality is sometimes limited, but the Word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless. And now, here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Let this be to you. Eventually we had to come to the subject of death and judgment, but let us not plunge in immediately. If there's anything that characterizes life, it is an intolerance of boundaries. We all want the infinite. That is why we are disappointed very often. We realize the tremendous disproportion that there is between an ideal that we have conceived and reality itself. But still we go on searching, simply because we have an indefinite capacity for more. You cannot imagine yourself in possession of any good thing of not wanting more. Nature sets limits, however, to the more of our bodies. A boy's eyes are bigger than his stomach. There's a limit to bodily pleasures. They may even reach a point where they become pain, and we become sickened of their own too much. But there are no limits to the desires of the soul. They never reach a point of satiety. There is no limit to a truth that you can know, to the life that you can live, to the love that you can enjoy, and to the beauty you can experience. If this were all, I mean what we have in this world, how we would be cheated. We would be frustrated just like a woman, mad about fashions, who might be put into a room where there were a thousand hats, but not a single mirror. Once you have a body and a soul, you can make one or the other master. You can make the body serve the soul, which is the Christian way, or you can make the soul serve the body, which is the miserable way. It is this choice which makes life so very serious. There would be no fun in playing games unless there was a chance to lose. There would be no zest in battle if crowns of merit rest suspended over those who did not fight. There would be no interest in dramas if the characters were puppets. And there would be no point in life unless there were great and eternal destinies at stake in which we say aye or nay to our eternal salvation. Our blessed Lord put it this way, and fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul, but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell. On another occasion our Lord said, what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul? Or what exchange shall a man give for his soul? There will come a time when this trial will be over. I know it is very difficult to convince modern minds about it. They do not like to hear that life will end. That is why death is so often disguised today by morticians. They would almost make you believe there was happiness in every box. They do not wish to face the fact of man's end. And have you noticed how much the modern mind feels awkward in the face of death? He does not know how to extend sympathy. He does not scruple at reading detective stories in which there are a dozen deaths or murders. But that's because he concentrates on the circumstances preceding the death rather than on the eternal issues involved in death, namely heaven or hell. He never asks saved or lost, but rather who killed Cock Robin? There are those who think that death belongs to the purely natural or biological order and therefore that man dies just like pigs and roosters die. And for exactly the same reason. But this is not true. Man has a soul which is spiritual and immortal and the death of a man is not the same as the death of a beetle. An animal life is like a circle unfolding from within and turning back upon itself. Man's life is like a trajectory that reaches out beyond time to someone who comes to meet it. The real reason for death therefore is not in the natural order but in the historical order in the sense that at the beginning of human history man sinned and the penalty of sin is death. This is the way the scripture puts it. It was through one man that guilt came into the world. And since death came owing to guilt, death was handed on to all mankind by one man. It is therefore because of original sin that we die. If there were no sin, there would be no death. That is the reason why the assumption of our Blessed Mother follows her immaculate conception. The Blessed Mother's body did not become subject to corruption because she was preserved free from sin. Our Blessed Lord in giving us the Eucharist implied the resurrection of the body thanks to the fact that we were united to his body and blood. As he put it, the man who eats my flesh and drinks my blood enjoys eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day. The resurrection of our Lord therefore is the pledge of our own resurrection. St. Paul tells us in rather a harsh and yet not stoical manner that we have to die daily. A happy death is a masterpiece and no masterpiece was ever perfected in a day. Du Bois spent seven years in making the wax model for his celebrated statue Joan of Arc. One day the model was finished and the bronze was poured into it. The statue stands today as a ravishing perfection of the sculptor's art. In like manner, our death at the end of our natural existence must appear as a ravishing perfection of the many years of labor we have given to it and given to its mold by dying daily. That is to say, by mortification. The principal reason why we fear death is because we have never prepared for it. Most of us die only once, when we should have died a thousand times, aye, when we should have died daily. Death is a terrible thing for him who dies only when he dies, but it is a beautiful thing for him who dies before he dies, namely by dying daily to the temptations of the world and the flesh and the devil. There is a very interesting inscription over the tomb of Don Scotus in Cologne which reads Semul sepultus bis mortuus, a double death preceded his burial. There's not one traveler in a hundred who understands the mystery of love behind it. Now once death comes, there's no remedy for an evil life, but before it comes, there is a remedy, namely by dying to ourselves in which we follow the law of immolation which is the law of the universe. There's no other way of entering into a higher life except by dying to the Lord. There's no possibility of a man enjoying an ennobled existence in Christ unless he's torn up from the old Adam. To him who leads a mortified life in Christ, death then never comes like a thief in the night, taking one by surprise. We die daily and thus we rehearse, but whether we rehearse or not, there is no escaping the truth. It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this, the judgment. Those are the words of sacred scripture. As relatives and friends gather around a dead person, they often ask, how much did he leave? But the angels will ask, how much did he take with him? The only thing that we can take with us in death is what we can take with us in a shipwreck, namely our merits. Then there comes the judgment. Judgment is twofold. We will be judged at the moment of death, which is the particular judgment, and we will be judged on the last day, which is the general judgment. The first judgment is because you are a person, and therefore you are individually responsible for your acts. Your works follow you. But the second judgment will be because you worked out your salvation in the context of the social order and the mystical body of Christ, therefore you must be judged with all men. Are we worried about this general judgment when we take upon ourselves our bodies? This general judgment will be accompanied, as we said, by the resurrection of the body. At death, when the soul is separated from the body, it still retains its aptitude for the body. The soul has made an imprint on it, very much as if you left your hand on warm wax. One might almost say that at death the soul desires to have the body with it. Now this is because when the soul leaves the body at death, it does not leave the body forever. The soul does not become an angel. It remains a human soul. It contains all of its experiences, all of its happenings, all of its thoughts, and all of its deeds. At the resurrection of the dead, the soul will have a body corresponding to the spiritual condition of the soul. In other words, it will be glorious if the soul is saved, and miserable if the soul is lost. Our salvation, therefore, is not just the salvation of the soul, but of our entire personality. Because our bodies have shared in the condition of our soul, they will also share in the glory or the shame of the soul. If you pour water into a blue glass, it looks blue. Pour it into a red glass, it looks red. Like manner, on the day of resurrection, our bodies will shine forth according to the virtues that are in the soul, or according to the foulness of vices that are in our soul. We've already spoken at other times of the particular, of the general judgment. Here another word about the particular judgment. What will it be like? It will be an evaluation of ourselves just as we really are. As we live this life, there almost seem to be several persons in us. There first of all is the person others think we are. Then there's the person we think we are. And then there is the person we really are. During this life, it is very easy for us to believe our press notices, our publicity, to take ourselves very seriously, to judge ourselves by public opinion rather than by eternal truth, and hence we may and do think ourselves good because we find neighbors who are so wicked. We sometimes judge our virtues by the vices from which we abstain. If we made our money under a capitalistic system, we think labor organizations are wicked. And if we made our money organizing labor unions, we think capitalism is wicked. If we come from the city, we look down on people from the country. We think because a person speaks with an accent, he is unimportant, that if he is black or brown or yellow, he is of less value. Our very enthusiasm for the common man may be because we hate the rich, not because we love the common man. We're not therefore always seeing things straight. We are wearing smoked glasses. St. Paul implied that when he said we see now through a glass in a dark manner, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I am known. When that split second of judgment comes, then what are we really? We are what we are, not by our emotions, our feelings, our likes and dislikes, but by our choices, our decisions. To change the figure, we are all on the roadway of life in this world, but we travel in different vehicles. Some in trucks, some in jeeps, some in ambulances, others in twelve-cylinder cars, and others in broken-down old wrecks, and others in trucks, but each of us is doing the driving. So the judgment is something like being stopped by a motor cop. So when we are stopped by God, he does not say to us, as the policeman does not say, what kind of a car are you driving? God is no respecter of persons. He asks, how well did you drive? Did you obey the laws? At death we leave our vehicles behind, our emotions, prejudices, feelings, our state in life, our opportunities, the accidents of talent, beauty, intelligence, and position. Hence it will make no difference to God if we were crippled, ignorant, or hated by the world. Our judgment will be based not on our social position, but on the way we lived, on the choices we made, on the things we loved. Think not therefore that when you go before the judgment seat of God that you will argue a case. You will plead no extenuating circumstances. You will not ask for a new trial, nor a new jury. You will be your own judge. You will be your own jury. As scripture says, we will be condemned out of our own mouths. God will merely seal our judgment. What then is judgment, first of all, from God's point of view, and then from our point of view? First from God's point of view, judgment is recognition. Two souls appear before the sight of God in that split second after death. One is in the state of grace, the other is not. Remember grace is a participation of divine nature. Remember that just as by nature you resemble your parents, so by grace we partake of the nature of God. Now the judge, our blessed Lord, looks into the soul in the state of grace. He sees there the resemblance of his nature, and just as a mother knows her child because that child shares her nature, so too God knows his own children by resemblance of nature. If we are born of him, he knows it, and seeing in that soul the divine likeness, the sovereign judge says to us, come, ye blessed of my father. I have taught you to pray, our father. I am the natural son, you the adopted son. Come into the kingdom I have prepared for you from all eternity. Now let us look at the other soul that does not possess the family traits of the Trinity, and as a mother knows that her neighbor's son is not her own because there is no sharing in her nature, so too our Lord, seeing in the sinful soul, no likeness of his own can only say those words, terrible words which signify non-recognition, I know you not. And it is a terrible thing not to be known by God. Such is judgment from the divine point of view. Now let us take it up from the human point of view, from our own point of view. Here too it is a recognition, but a recognition of unfitness or unfitness. Just suppose that a very distinguished visitor is announced one day at your door. You are in working clothes and your hands and face are dirty. You are in no condition whatever to present yourself before such an august person. And you refuse therefore to see him until you can improve your appearance. A soul that is stained with sin acts very much the same way when it goes before the judgment seat of God. It sees on the one hand or gets some vague glimpse at least of his majesty, his purity, his brilliance, and on the other, its soul's baseness, its sinfulness, its unworthiness. It does not entreat nor argue nor plead at case, it sees, and from out of the depths it says, O Lord, I am not worthy. But a soul that is stained with venial sins says, give me time to clean up, and goes into purgatory to wash its baptismal robes. But the soul that is remediably stained, dead to divine light, casts itself into hell just as naturally as a stone which was released from my hand falls to the ground. And the soul that is full of divine love and without any temporal punishment due to its sins is like a bird released from its cage, it flies to its medium which is heaven. Three possible destinies await you at death and judgment. Hell, which is pain without love. Purgatory, pain with love. Heaven, love without pain. God love you. This has been Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For more information about this series, contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. Outside the U.S., call 818-331-3549. And please join us again next time for Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen on EWTN Global Catholic Radio. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.