The certainty of Christian faith as the way of life comes from the conviction that death is not the end for human beings. Something “comes next” because human life is different from animal life, which does end with death. Human beings reach beyond bodily death because our identity is able to be carried by an immortal soul, spiritual in nature and therefore apt for eternal life.

The eternity we enter at death begins with a judgment. God has created us to live forever because, made in his image and likeness, God calls us to share, as far as creatures can, in the life of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This happy ending to our earthly life is not, however, a foregone conclusion. All depends upon our cooperation with God’s plan for us. What we are and do in this life is heavy with eternal consequences. When we emerge from the shadows of this life into the light of God’s presence at death, what we have made of ourselves will measure itself against the truth of God for us. In that moment, we shall judge ourselves.

If the love of God has shaped our life, if, despite our frailty and our sins, we have tried to live according to God’s plan for us, then we shall be with God forever. Even if we first need the purification of purgatory, we will live forever in union with God. This is heaven.

If, on the other hand, we have used our freedom to keep God out of our life, if we have chosen our will rather than God’s will for us, then our soul could not, after death, stand to live in the presence of the infinitely intense love of God. Then we would be alone, apart from God forever. That is hell.

“At the evening of life,” says St. John of the Cross, “we shall be judged on love.” God shows those in hell all the love they are willing to accept: his justice. To us on earth, God shows his loving mercy. To those in heaven, God shows his face, which is beyond all imagining, the face of love that has no limit and never ends.

The world as we know it will pass away to become something better. When I consecrate a new church in the Archdiocese, I often point to the altar and explain that the altar in every Catholic Church is the center of the universe, because Christ is the center of history. With his death and resurrection, Christ ushers in the last times. At the end of the Church’s liturgical year, the scripture readings at Mass speak of the general judgement that will come with the end of this world. We contemplate our own end, our own death, in the context of the death of the entire cosmos and its passage into something greater, the kingdom of God in Christ. This kingdom exists already in this world through the presence of the Church, the body of Christ who acts through the sacraments.

Jesus Christ is the end of the ages, the axis of time. In him, the salvation which is the future that God has in store for us has already broken into time. Because Christ, our savior, has risen from the dead, our bodies too shall rise to be joined to our souls and transformed into the stuff of eternity (I Thes. 4:16). What we bring into eternity are our relationships: to God, to those whom God has given us to love, to bodies and souls intrinsically related here and, because of the resurrection from the dead, destined to live forever. The world inaugurated by the general judgment at the end of time will be a world of wholeness and holiness, a world healed and restored. It will be a world where God’s judgment on sin and on the misuse of his gifts will be completely understood, a world that knows both heaven and hell, a world of the most lucid and spiritual clarity, where the mercy and love of God are totally revealed, radiant with the victory of Christ.

This certainty of our own death and this vision, from faith, of the world to come puts everything in this world into perspective. At the end of each calendar year, commentators and pundits analyze the trends of current history and try to forecast the year to come. There are general trends: what we have come to call “globalization” in politics, economics and culture; shifts in centers of population from continent to continent; the influence of secularism on the one hand and the growth of religion on the other. Each of these can be troubling or encouraging, depending on what one hopes might come next.

Christian hope, however, does not depend on trends in this life but on the belief that this life and what we do in it will pass away, taken up into the action of Christ as ruler of the universe. What comes next depends on him and is certain because of what he has already done in his passion, death and resurrection. The Church’s vocation in every age is to stand with Christ, her head, and to gather the whole human family around him. She is to discern what is happening and relate it to what will come next. She stands with humanity in facing the great problems of history, but she is always rooted in the once-for-all saving action of Christ. The virtues of a people using the present to prepare the future, a future shaped by Christ, are deep faith, patient perseverance, strong hope, clarity of moral vision and unrelenting courage.

Writing about the mission of the Church in the new millennium, Pope John Paul II has said: “Let us go forward in hope. A new millennium is opening before the Church like a vast ocean upon which we shall venture, relying on the help of Christ. The Son of God who became incarnate 2,000 years ago out of love for humanity is at work even today; we need discerning eyes to see this and, above all, a generous heart to become the instruments of his work.” (Novo Millennium Ineunte, 58). The future shapes our present calling, because we are called by Christ to live with him forever. That’s what comes next. God bless you.