Today’s liturgy affirms our faith that “the dead rise
again” and our “God-given hope of being restored to
life” after death. This faith and hope are founded in Jesus
Christ, “the first-born from the dead,” the source of
our “eternal consolation and hope.”
Our “God is not the God of the dead but of the living,”
and our religion is not a religion of death but of resurrection and
life.
Faith in eternal life has energized Christians for centuries. It has
also, unfortunately, caused some of them to neglect the immediate
task at hand: the right ordering of the world in preparation for the
coming of the kingdom.
Today’s liturgy counteracts that tendency with a message of
doing God's work on earth and giving our lives in service to all.
All too often Christians are faulted with a certain indifference toward earthly projects, as if one could not fully count on us for radical social reform. The charge may be unfair, but the danger is real enough.
Our hope in another life must not be allowed to seduce believers into neglecting our task in the present one.
U.S. Bishops, Pastoral Letter on Marxist Communism,1980:4
