25. Life Beyond Death - Heaven and Bach. Radio 4 Lent Talk
by Graham Kings
Date added: 19/04/2025
Audio File of BBC Radio 4 Lent Talk, 13 April 2025, 7.45pm-8.00pm
I love this epitaph found on a grave in Bushey churchyard, Hertfordshire. It dates from before 1860 and was quoted in a letter to the Spectatoron 2 September 1922.
Here lies a poor woman who always was tired,
For she lived in a place where help wasn’t hired.
Her last words on earth were, ‘Dear friends I am going
Where washing ain’t done nor sweeping nor sewing,
And everything there is exact to my wishes,
For where they don’t eat there’s no washing of dishes…
Don’t mourn for me now, don’t mourn for me never.
I’m going to do nothing for ever and ever.
It is poignant, heartfelt and witty. Life beyond death conjures up various imaginings, but how does the Bible portray the ‘life of the world to come’? In Revelation, the last book, we see a kaleidoscope of encouraging glimpses of activity.
There is no suffering, death, and evil. There is joy in the presence of God and of Jesus Christ, profound worship, God’s people reunited, a variety of cultures, and celebration at a wedding feast.
This feast theme resonates with passages in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the Gospels. In Isaiah26, Isaiah prophesies:
On this mountain the Lord of Hosts will prepare
a banquet of rich fare for all peoples,
a banquet of wines well matured...
He will swallow up death for ever.
In the parables of Jesus, parties are key to participation in the kingdom of God now, and in the future. In Luke 13 he declares:
From east and west, from north and south, people will come and take their places at the banquet in the kingdom of God.
He challenges the leaders of his own people and gives a startling promise of Gentiles, the non-Jews, being included at the family table of God. They have places set for them, with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as Matthew’s version makes clear.
From 1985 to 1991, my wife, Alison and I, and our family, lived at St Andrew’s College, Kabare, in the foothills of Mount Kenya. In the chapel, the right-hand mahogany door, carved by a friend, Benson Ndaka, has a relief portraying this verse in Luke of the messianic feast. Benson’s left-hand door expounds the feeding of the 5,000, the miracle which looks forward to the Last Supper. Its narrative even uses the same words of ‘taking’, ‘blessing’, ‘breaking’ and ‘giving’.
I remember vividly our Thursday evening services of Holy Communion in that chapel, facing Mount Kenya. Past, present and future combined in the traditional place of Kikuyu worship, with carvings and contextual liturgy. Then a procession, with dance and song and ululations, concluded with a feast in the dining hall. A taste of heaven here on earth!
When I served as Bishop of Sherborne, in Dorset, I was asked to take a primary school assembly in a village, soon after a schoolboy had died in a car accident. During the question-and-answersession, a girl asked me, ‘Why do we have to die?’
Not an easy question. I paused for a moment and then suggested that we needed new bodies to live in a new place, with God in heaven. These bodies, which we have now, don’t work in heaven. And to get new bodies, we have to die.
I asked them whether a fish can live in the air, out of water. ‘No’, came the reply. And what about us? Can we live and breathe in water, for hours and hours without special equipment? ‘No’. Each climate needs its own, particular body. So,death and being raised with a new body is likedbeing kitted out for a change of climate.
In 2018, my cousin Andrew was dying of a tumour. I visited him in a hospice in Essex,which was full of peace. He asked me what I felt about dying and what happens afterwards. I thought for a bit and then mentioned that,perhaps, dying and being born were, in some ways, similar.
A baby is tucked up in the womb and relies totally on the mother for life support. It has no idea of the enormity and diversity of real life, because it is restricted. Then, after a traumatic experience, through a narrow space, the baby is born. Immediately, a new system for acquiring oxygen kicks in. The intricate process of itcoming through the placenta of the mother, gives way to air breathed directly into the baby’s lungs.
I then shared my idea that after we die, it is like entering a narrow corridor - but we are not alone. We are escorted through that corridor byChrist. He knows us and comes towards us. He walks with us and then introduces us to our homeland of God’s eternal joy and to God’s surprising people. As in Jesus’ parables, there are likely to be many surprises.
Andrew asked me to mention those ideas at his funeral, so that others could be comforted too. I said I would, and I did.
At funerals, I sometimes share my poem, ‘By the Waters of Delivery’. I wrote this as I contemplated the theme of water in the Bible -from Genesis to Revelation - and a woman giving birth.
By breathing and brooding,
by breaking and birthing,
by parting and loosing,
by stirring and soothing:
by giving, re-living,
by stilling, refreshing,
by drowning, immersing,
by raising, re-versing,
you, Lord, deliver us.
The last clause of the Nicene Creed is, ‘I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come’. But when do Christians believe we receive our resurrection bodies? When we die? Or on the Last Day when God wraps up history and remakes the whole of creation? Some verses in the New Testament imply the former and some the latter. How do we reconcile them?
The following is my attempt. Time only belongs to this world and not to the next. When we die, we pass outside the dimension of time. So, we receive our resurrection bodies in the twinkling of an eye. From the point of view of a person dying, there is no gap between death and the last day of the universe. But, from the point of view of those who mourn there is a gap of time.
Imagine your friend, sadly, dying tonight and the end of the world coming in ten years’ time. She would pass outside of time, and the instant she dies will be for her the same as the moment when the universe is remade. For you, who remain and mourn, there would be a ten-year gap between your friend’s death and the end of the universe. So, from the point of view of the person who dies, resurrection is instantaneous.
Recently, I’ve enjoyed reading James Runcie’s novel about Johann Sebastian Bach, The Great Passion. In this Lent series we have been interweaving clips from the Credo of Bach’s B-minor Mass with meditations on the Nicene Creedand we will hear two more at the end of this programme. Runcie’s book focuses imaginatively on the composing of Bach’s other famous work, the Saint Matthew Passion. After its premiere, Bach is exhausted and says:
All I’ve done is to try to glimpse that music we might one day hear in heaven. Celestial music – the ultimate harmony, played with such variation that it has no end.
After his funeral, Catharina, one of Bach’s daughters, speaks to the narrator, Stefan, about The Art of Fugue:
He wrote a fugue based on the initials of his own name, but the notes break off abruptly, like someone suddenly stopping in the middle of a sentence, unable to remember what they’re going to say next. But I wonder if, perhaps, it was deliberate, a challenge to anyone reading it to go on and finish it themselves. “You know the rest. You don’t need me.”’
I think Catharina has a point. Bach’s health was failing while he was preparing The Art of Fugue for publication.
In 2009, during a Quiet Day at Westminster Abbey a couple months before my consecration there as a bishop, I wrote a poem which mentions The Art of Fugue. It is entitled, ‘Finished in the New Creation’ and features Bach, as well as the poet Coleridge and the painter Turner, all of whom left unfinished works.
Bach was fascinated by maths as well as by music, as Ruth Tatlow has shown in her book, Bach’s Numbers: Compositional Proportion and Significance. Into an earlier version of his Credo,he inserted a new 49 bar chorus on the Incarnation. This had the effect of making the music illustrating the Crucifixion fall exactly at the halfway point of the Credo. As a good Lutheran, he was literally and mathematicallymaking the cross central.
Bach dedicated The Art of Fugue to the Mathematical Institute of Leipzig, where he worked at St Thomas’s Church, and added his usual ‘SDG’ at the top of the manuscript. These are the initials of his favourite, humble, Latin phrase, Soli Deo Gloria – ‘To God alone be the glory’.
Here is the verse about Bach in my poem and the final verse:
The flourishing hand of Bach,
interweaving the sum of his works,
leaves unfinished
his Art of Fugue,
interrupted, solely,
by the glory of God.
All are finished, completed, perfected,
in the new creation of God.
The Latin original of the English, ‘I look for’ is expecto. At the end of the Credo, the whole phrase, ‘And I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come’ is the only section of text in the entire B-minor Massthat Bach sets twice. There are two intensely contrasting sections of pure religious emotion.The first marked, with the Italian term Adagio – which means, ‘to be played slowly’ – and the second marked, Vivace – which means it should be ‘lively and brisk’.
Christoph Wolff, a leading Bach scholar, has written the following in the multi-authored book, Exploring Bach’s B-minor Mass:
The extremely expressive five-part a cappella setting of the Adagio, accompanied only by the thoroughbass, is filled with unprecedented chromatic and enharmonic devises that very movingly illustrate human suffering, misery and pain invariably and ultimately leading to death. It is the ‘I look for’, the anxious and worried waiting, which Bach underscores in the Adagio.
Let’s listen to it. [excerpt from Bach's Credo, B-minor Mass, Adagio, Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum]
Did you hear the intriguing, extending, groping, aching harmonies, expressing our time of yearning and waiting? It is almost as if this music acts out – sometimes excruciatingly - our Lenten season of preparation. Bach was near to death as he was completing this masterpiece. His eyesight was failing, as can be seen by his handwriting on the original manuscript of the later sections.
And then, with the Vivace, Bach bursts forth, surprisingly, with his full orchestra, led by trumpets and timpani – always his clue to the resurrection. With one bound, he boundlessly portrays his exuberant, ebullient faith. Yes. There is a resurrection of the dead, because of Christ’s resurrection. Yes. There is life in the world to come, as we are linked to Christ, who comes to meet us and escort us home.
So, we end our six-part series for Lent on the Nicene Creed with Bach’s overwhelmingexpression of God’s eternal joy. On the eve of Palm Sunday, let us listen, believe and join the feast.
[Excerpt from Bach's Credo, B-minor Mass, Vivace, to the words Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi. Amen.]
