Christian Hope: You Will Live Forever

Credo vitam aeternam. We say it at Mass, Baptisms, marriages, and in daily prayer. Yet if someone were to ask you right now—“Do you believe you will live forever?”—how would you respond? If you truly believe what you profess, you should answer with an unambivalent “Yes!”

But for the “hmm…not sure” within us, we thankfully look forward to the Ordinary Jubilee of 2025, designated a “Year of Hope” by Pope Francis to begin this Christmas Eve. He will kneel at the threshold of the Holy Door of Saint Peter’s Basilica and pray that the Jubilee “reawaken in us … a yearning for the treasures of heaven” (Jubilee Prayer). Such yearning is the essence of Christian hope. Our souls were made to hunger and thirst for union with God in a way that subordinates and reorients our every other desire.

“Hope,” we read in the Catechism, “is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 1817). As a theological virtue, hope, along with faith and charity, relates directly to God and adapts our faculties for participation in divine nature (cf. CCC 1812). God has “poured out” the Holy Spirit “upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that we might be justified by his grace and become heirs in hope of eternal life” (Titus 3:6-7). 

Of supreme assistance in rekindling our yearning for the “treasures of heaven” is a reappreciation of the moment when we first made our profession of faith (or someone made it on our behalf): Baptism. In the waters of Baptism, our death was inextricably joined with Christ’s. Saint Paul teaches that, in Baptism, we die with Christ, we are buried with Him, and we rise with Him: “We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life” (Rom 6:4). In Baptism, we “put on Christ” because through the Holy Spirit we are cleansed of sin, justified, and sanctified (cf. 1 Cor 6:11; 12:13).

A rediscovery of the amazing grace we received at Baptism helps us to remember that Christian hope regards not only the future, but the present. It expresses an encounter with God that is not only “informative,” but “performative,” in that such an encounter can “change our lives, so that we know we are redeemed” (Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 4 [emphasis added]). We wake up each day in the hope of a new heaven and a new earth. We go to bed in the hope that, at the end of time, the Reign of God will reach its fullness. We live each moment in the hope that, at the universal judgment, the just will reign forever with Christ glorified in His body and soul, and the entire world will be renewed. We live from year to year in the hope that the Church will reach her perfection in the glory of heaven and that the universe “will be perfectly re-established in Christ” (Gaudium et Spes, 39).

To live in the hope of such realities is to have no doubt that they will be fulfilled. To live in hope means to answer unhesitatingly, “Yes, I will live forever!” To live in hope means that, “according to his promise, we await new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). The expression “new heavens and a new earth” (2 Peter 3:13), rooted in Isaiah (cf. Is 65:17), was understood by early Christians precisely as the renewal of humanity and of the entire world that would occur at Jesus’s second coming. Saint Paul describes it as the “recapitulation” of all things “in the heavens and on the earth” (Eph 1:10), when God will make His abode among us and wipe away every tear from our eyes. There will be no death, nor mourning, nor calamity, nor pain, and the new creation will be the last as the prior will fade away (Rev 21:4).

Perhaps most importantly, this consummation at the end of time will be the definitive fulfilment of the unity of the human race desired by God. And do we ever need it! God desired our unity from the moment of creation, and the pilgrim Church is a “sign” of this unity (Cf. Lumen Gentium, 1). Those who will have been united to Christ will form the community of the redeemed, the “holy City” of God (Rev 21:2), and the “bride of the Lamb” (Rev 21:9). The Church will no longer be wounded by the stain of sin, by love of itself, or by anything that can wound or destroy the community of mankind on earth. It will consist in the beatific vision in which God will be opened in an inexhaustible way to all, a perennial source of happiness, peace, and mutual communion.

“Unfurl the sails, and let God steer us where He will,” exhorted Saint Bede the Venerable. If we truly trust that God is in control of our lives and of the entire world, nothing will stop us from allowing Him to lead us where He will, precisely because, in Christ, we have the assurance that we will get there with His help.

Yes, you will live forever!

Image from Meisterdrucke