Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus talks about raising us on the last day. Our faith is that God will clothe the soul in a new and higher body, what Paul calls a “spiritual body.” Here we might rely on the musings of John Polkinghorne, the Christian physicist, who appreciates the soul as the “form” or pattern of the person. God remembers this “form” and then reconstitutes it at a higher level during the resurrection, much as the pattern of an article or a photograph could be preserved in a computer’s memory and then reproduced in a new way.
Listen again to the words of Jesus in our Gospel today: “Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and I will not reject anyone who comes to me . . .” As you pray for the souls of your beloved dead, take comfort in those words. They will be raised again.