Is death final? Christian faith says no, and there is an essential truth in Paul's words to the Corinthians: "If Christ has not been raised (from the dead), your faith is futile." (1 Cor 15:17) But we live in a rational age, and it is a question that is often asked.
Many people with no religion would state that "when you're dead, you're dead" - as if that meant anything! But their actions do not always back this up. There is a widespread belief that one "should not speak ill of the dead" - as if the dead are eavesdropping of our conversations. People will participate in Remembrance Day parades because it is "right to honour the dead" - but if the dead were really no more in existence, then honouring them would not make sense.
Other people who would deny having any firm faith have no hesitation in trying to communicate with dead friends and relations: indeed, mediums and spiritualists manage to carry on their trade, and even expand it. Even if we treat this in many cases as mere superstition, it shows at least that people believe there is something more in the world around us than the things that can be weighed or measured.
If we want details of what happens beyond death, we will not find a fixed timetable in our Bibles. Indeed, a recurring theme is that this is not something we should ask. Only God knows the future. God "is not a God of the dead, but of the living" (a very Semitic way of saying that God is far more concerned with what we do here and now than with what we want to know about the future!). Over the time covered in the Old Testament, the realization dawned that God's people were God's for all time, and Jesus and his followers all held the view that at the end of time, God would come and test our hearts, and call those whose love was not entirely dead.
One view is that the church comprises not only those "militant here on earth", not only "the saints triumphant in heaven", but also those "expectant" - those who have seen heaven's pure joy and await the time when they can be part of it - even if they have a little way to go! By the time of the Reformation, this had led to all sorts of ideas: the time of waiting was called Purgatory and was thought to be a time of pain and suffering, which could be reduced by prayers, or even by other people's good works.
There may have been be a grain of truth in this idea, just as a lover might say to their beloved "It's hell being away from you." But the excesses led quite rightly to a reaction at the Reformation. Some of the Protestant reformers went too far the other way. There was a view that prayers for the dead were pointless, and calling on the dead to pray for us was pointless.
But Jesus himself not only prayed for the dead - he raised them too. The centurion's daughter, and Lazarus in his grave, were signs that God's power does not stop at the physical boundary of death. Part of "the middle way" of Anglicanism is the prayer book's petition for "all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear" that "with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom".
The feeling that the dead are not totally far away is one that is very real in times of bereavement. We still feel the contact of those close to us, we find separation painful. We erect gravestones, so that we can go and be with those who have given much to us in life; we erect cenotaphs and memorials to those who died for their country, to show that their presence and their sacrifice is still close to our hearts. And if this separation is not final, perhaps we can hope for their prayers on our behalf, just as we hope for the prayers of any other friend, and just as we hope for the prayers of our true friend, Jesus, who, we know, is not dead, but is alive, and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever!
HD