Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, in the Salve Regina, the familiar anthem that we often sing to our Lady, we sing these words in Latin which you will recognise from this familiar translation: ‘Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy; hail, our life our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. Turn, then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us, and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.’ I want to draw attention to those words, ‘banished’ and ‘exile’. I don’t think that, although we pray this prayer often, we really think closely about what those words are telling us. To be banished is to be sent away from home, away from the place where we belong, into a place and state of pain and punishment. To become exiles is to be displaced, uprooted, insecure, forced to eke out an existence far from home and loved ones. Is that really what this life is about, we may ask?
Well, in the second reading today St Paul tells the Corinthians that that is truly our state in this world. Even though we have never known another world, another life, St Paul is adamant that here in this life we are in exile. But if this is exile, what are we exiled from? St Paul says that simply to live ‘in this body’ is to be exiled from the Lord. In other words, our proper state of existence is one that we do not even know by experience, but can only have knowledge of by faith, by trust in God that He, the Lord, is indeed our true home, our true destiny. Our life’s work, then, must be finding out how to get to our true homeland. There’s the real point of the here and now!
Let’s recognise that St Paul proclaims this not with alarm and despondency, as you would expect an exile, a banished person, to do; no, he says that ‘we are always full of confidence when we remember that to live in the body is to be exiled from the Lord.’ What is the meaning of this confidence, then? Why should we be confident about being exiles? It is because of what we know about our true home by faith and not by sight. That faith is what gives us confidence which means that we can grow to want to be exiled from this world, from the world of the body, so as to make our home with the Lord.
We know, of course, that at our death we will for a time lose our bodies. They will be treated not as rubbish to be thrown carelessly away, but as precious vessels where the Holy Spirit has dwelt in us, and where the Blessed Sacrament has so often taken up His home in us. That indeed makes of this life in the body something more than just a sad exile. It is the cause of our joy and confidence that if we have received the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the living flesh and blood of Christ into our bodies, then even they are sanctified, are made holy, because they are not to be lost to us for ever.
After our death we will indeed go, not with our bodies, but with everything that we have been in this life – our deeds, our thoughts and emotions, our joys and sorrows, the things we have sacrificed and the things we have failed to do – with all these we will stand as souls before God and be judged by Him. Note how St Paul, having spoken of confidence in this future we must all prepare ourselves for, now mentions the ‘law court of Christ,’ in which all the truth about us will be brought out into the open, and then we will be given the just deserts for what we have done in the body, that is, during this life, whether these things were good or bad.
Now we also know that beside the many things that we do that are good, there are also many others that are bad. No one can avoid sin altogether. St John says that to say we do not commit sins is in effect to call God a liar! What we must do, therefore, is to prepare for our judgement not just when we are on our deathbed, much less if we are taken suddenly and without due preparation, God forbid, but daily by examining our conscience. We must make a habit of confessing our sins and doing penance so as to eradicate them and thereby also learn to increase the good we do.
The judgement that we all receive in the law court of Christ is what we call our immediate personal judgement. That is what will determine our eternal destiny. If we are judged worthy of eternal life by Christ then we may still have to make atonement for those things we have done or failed to do and for which we have not atoned. That is what we mean by Purgatory, which is a state and period of preparation in which we make amendment for our sins and grow in holiness so as to be able to enter our true homeland which is to live with God in heaven.
We also speak in the Creed of Christ as the one who ‘will come again in glory to Judge the living and the dead.’ What does that mean for those who have died already? Will they be judged again? No. The final judgement is that which brings to a close the age of this world of exile and trial for everyone, living and dead alike. For remember, even the dead who go to heaven, the saints, are still without their bodies. It is only at the Last Judgement that all of us who have long since died will receive our bodies, glorified after the pattern of Christ’s glorious risen body, and then the true homeland will be revealed to us in all its glory, for then we shall no longer have to believe in it by faith, but we will see it from our own flesh. We will no longer have to believe in God, because we will see Him face to face. This is why we should understand that this present life, even with whatever joy there may be, is still only an exile, a banishment, and that our true homeland is in heaven where our bodies, too, will be glorified.
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