Ash Wednesday Reflection | Rising with Christ in our glorified bodies at the end of time

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to lead our Year 12 Cohort in an Ash Wednesday Liturgy. In this short article, I will reflect on the Lenten message that I shared with our college community.

           Firstly, it is the Church’s Tradition that the faithful be marked with ashes on their foreheads in the form of a Cross on Ash Wednesday. Since death is a certainty of life, the ashes that our students and staff were marked with are meant to serve as a reminder of our mortality, sin and death: “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” No doubt, the body—our human flesh—will decay when our time on earth is no longer.

           However, the Catholic Church offers to humanity a vision of life that extends beyond death after our earthly existence. I shared with our college community that death does not have the final say because each person, created in the image and likeness of God, is called to abide with Him and in Him forever in Eternity (Genesis 1:26). Thus, for Christians, death is but our doorway into eternal life as opposed to merely being the ‘end’ of life. The Catechism affirms that in death, “the human body decays and the soul goes to meet God.”[1]

           Moreover, the Church professes the belief in the Resurrection of the Body. As the soul goes on to meet God after death, it awaits “its reunion with its glorified body.”[2] This means that just as Jesus Christ rose from the dead, we too in Him shall likewise rise from the dead in our own glorified body. St Thomas Aquinas, faithful to Sacred Scripture and the Tradition of the Church, famously affirmed that by way of reason and necessity, “there will be a resurrection of the body.”[3] He explained that through the gift of Jesus Christ, we “will be restored from death to life.”[4] Thus, it is the destiny of each human person that, through Christ, they will rise from the dead and thereby experience a bodily resurrection. Such a vision of eternal life is meant to be celebrated in joyful hope and anticipation; so Lent is a time of hopeful preparation in this life as the Church looks forward to that glorious celebration of Easter Sunday.

           So, to summarise, I intended on helping the students and staff of our school community to become awakened to—or to rediscover in faith—the glory that awaits them after death. During Lent, it will benefit us to reflect on the Church’s teaching that death does not have the final say, because Christ—through His life, death and Resurrection—has merited for us the rewards of eternal life. So, with one voice, the Church continues to faithfully proclaim in the Apostle’s Creed that we “believe in… the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.”

[1] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 1997), 997.

[2] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 997.

[3] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1911-1925), or IIIa Suppl. q. 75, arts 1-3.

[4] Aquinas, Summa theologica, or IIIa Suppl. q. 75, arts 1-3.