Alexios Mor Eusebius

What Happens at Death?

In Houston on June 4, 2011

Today we remember a servant of God who lived among us and passed on to the Lord’s presence. In this context, I like to speak about death. Where are the dead people? Once we die, where are we? What do we know about the coming world? What will we be like when we are there?

There are people who can answer this question without any doubt based on some passages from the Bible or on some other documents. But if you ask me this question, I must admit that I am ignorant of it. I don’t know where we will be when we die.   But there are some things we know surely well about how we might be when we die.  

Before I was born into this world, I was first formed within the body of my mother. I was inside a very safe place, where I was provided with whatever I needed. That was the first stage of my existence. Once I was grown enough, I couldn’t live there anymore, and I was sent out of there to this world. This is the second stage of my existence. But my life does not end here either. It will continue to a third stage, and then later to a fourth stage. Let us call the third stage the spiritual world and the fourth one, heaven. Our life in this world is just one of the stages in our existence. We did not begin at birth and we will not end at death either.

It looks like we are very much like the butterflies, which have four stages in its existence as well.  A butterfly begins as an egg, then it becomes a caterpillar, then a pupa, and finally a butterfly. Our life inside the mother’s womb is similar to that of an egg. Our present life is similar to that of a caterpillar. Our coming life could be like that of the pupa. But finally we will emerge as glorious beings like a butterfly.

This metaphor helps us to answer various questions about our existence. The very first question one might ask is this: why do we have to go through these four stages?  Well, why does a butterfly have four stages? That is its nature. That is how God has planned its existence. A butterfly has to go through three stages of growth before becoming a butterfly. We are in our second stage, very much like a caterpillar, living our life on this earth. After being here for some time, we move to our pupa stage. A pupa doesn’t look like a living being in the eyes of a caterpillar. Within this apparently dead pupa happens further development and growth. Death is nothing but this transfer to this pupa stage for us.  We don’t know what happens to us in that stage. All we know is that we are not going to be in that stage for ever. We will have a resurrection which makes us emerge like butterflies as transformed and glorious beings.

Each of the succeeding stages is more complex than the preceding one. An egg is the simplest. A caterpillar is more complex, a pupa is still more complex, and finally a butterfly is the most complex. Our life in the mother’s body is the simplest, and much more complex is our life in this world. Even more complex is our life in the coming world. The most complex is our life in the heavenly stage.  The complexity of a certain stage cannot be comprehended from the view of the previous stage. When I was in my mother’s body, I couldn’t comprehend my present life. My present life was unimaginable to me when I was inside my mother. My present experience of life is so much different from how I experienced life then.  Similarly we can’t even imagine our life in the next stage. All we can say is that it will be totally different from our present existence.  

This point was made clear by our Lord Jesus Christ. Once some Sadducees approached our Lord with a tricky question to test him. A woman marries a man who dies leaving her with no children to carry on the family name. So along comes the younger brother who marries her and then dies leaving her with no children. Then another brother, and then another one, and then another until she has married all seven brothers who all die leaving her childless. And the natural question is, whose wife will she be in the resurrection? Jesus answered,

"The children of this age marry and remarry; but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise. That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush, when he called 'Lord' the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; and he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive." Luke 20: 34-38

Jesus made it clear that our life in the next stage is not anything like our life now. We have marriage here, but there is no marriage in the coming world. We have gender difference here, but we will be like angels in the next stage. All are alive in God’s eyes. That is how God is the God of Abraham, and at the same time, the God of those who are alive. Although Abraham appears dead to us, he is alive in God’s eyes.

To conclude, although we don’t know a lot of things about our life after death, we are sure of one thing: death is really not death. Although we appear to die, we really continue to live in a different way.  It is with this faith and hope that we live our present life. 

Back to Contents