Back from the Dead...The Demand for a Sign

Recently I have seen a number of blog entries by people about the book Heaven is for Real as well as (by extension) 90 Minutes in Heaven.  Both books, which have sold millions of copies, deal with the first person accounts of people who claim to have died and gone to heaven, only to return to life as we know it.

I haven’t read either book.  Though I'm certain I would take issue with some of the things said in them, I’m equally sure that many people have been blessed through reading them.  My interest here is not to criticize the content of these books. 

What I would like to address is the fact that there is such a hunger in the first place for this type of book.  It would seem that their primary focus is to reassure people that heaven actually is a real place that awaits (at least some of) us after death.  I find it curious that we need someone, be it an experienced pastor or a four-year-old boy, to tell us that there is a heaven, as if there was a doubt.  What is it about their word which we find more reliable than the Word of God?  Jesus already told us there is a heaven.  Didn't this pretty much solved the matter?

The reality is though, we are always demanding signs from God.  It is true today, just as it was in Biblical times.  In the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, Jesus told of a rich man in Hades, calling out to Abraham, asking him to send Lazarus (a poor man who had also died) back as a messenger to his family members so that they might believe.

There are any number of issues I would take with the particulars of Roman Catholic theology, but Pope Benedict XVI hits the nail on the head with the following words from his work, Jesus of Nazareth:

The rich man, looking up to Abraham from Hades, says what so many people, both then and now, say or would like to say to God: "If you really want us to believe in you and organize our lives in accord with the revealed word of the Bible, you'll have to make yourself clearer. Send us someone from the next world who can tell us that it is really so." The demand for signs, the demand for more evidence of Revelation, is an issue that runs through the entire Gospel. Abraham's answer -- like Jesus' answer to his contemporaries' demand for signs in other contexts -- is clear: If people do not believe the word of Scripture, then they will not believe someone coming from the next world either. 

But God has indeed graciously given us a sign.  Benedict goes on to write,

One thing is clear: God's sign for men is the Son of Man; it is Jesus himself. And at the deepest level, he is this sign in his Paschal Mystery, in the mystery of his death and Resurrection. He himself is "the sign of Jonah." He, crucified and risen, is the true Lazarus. The parable is inviting us to believe and follow him, God's great sign. But it is more than a parable. It speaks of reality, of the most decisive reality in all history.