Will We See, Know and Remember Our Loved Ones in Heaven? Yes

Yes. Scripture gives us every reason to hope that we will see again the people we love who died in Christ, and that we will know them, remember them and be known by them. Paul told grieving Christians that the living will be “caught up together with them,” and “so shall we ever be with the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:17).

The Bible gives us no picture of that meeting, but it gives us a garden. On the first Easter morning Mary Magdalene stood weeping at the empty tomb, turned, “and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus” (John 20:14). She took him for the gardener. Then he said one word. “Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni” (John 20:16). The risen Lord was changed, and he was still himself, and her name was enough. The God who called Mary by name has not forgotten ours, or the names of the people we have buried.

Paul wrote his first letter to the Thessalonians to people who had buried friends and were afraid they had lost them. “I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope,” he wrote, and he gave the reason: “if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him” (1 Thessalonians 4:13–14). He does not forbid our tears. He asks that hope be in them. The dead in Christ will rise, the living will be gathered “together with them,” and Paul ends, “Wherefore comfort one another with these words” (4:18).

The hope is older than Paul. When King David’s infant son died, David rose from his fasting and said, “can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me” (2 Samuel 12:23). Genesis says that when Abraham died he “was gathered to his people” (Genesis 25:8). Jesus spoke of a great table: “many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 8:11). Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are named at that table, father, son and grandson, still themselves.

The early Church held on to this through terrible years. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage in the third century, wrote to his people while a plague was killing many of them. Those who die in the Lord, he told them, “are not lost, but sent before.” And he described heaven as a homecoming: “There a great number of our dear ones is awaiting us, and a dense crowd of parents, brothers, children, is longing for us.” Most churches teach that a believer’s soul is with Christ from the moment of death and that the body is raised when he returns; whether believers go to heaven immediately sets out where they differ.

Everyone who met the risen Jesus came to know him, though not always at once. Two disciples walked with him to Emmaus without knowing him, and at supper “he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him” (Luke 24:30–31). That same evening he stood among the frightened apostles and showed them his wounds: “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see” (Luke 24:39). Rising from the dead had not made him a stranger. Paul calls him “the firstfruits of them that slept,” and promises that “they that are Christ’s” will follow “at his coming” (1 Corinthians 15:20, 23). What God did for him, he will do for those who belong to him.

On the mountain of the Transfiguration, Peter, James and John saw “Moses and Elias talking with him,” and Peter spoke of them by name at once: “let us make here three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias” (Matthew 17:3–4). No one had introduced them. Billy Graham, often asked whether we will know our families in heaven, pointed to this scene. His answer, he said, was “always a resounding yes,” and he expected to be reunited with “all those in my family who are already in Heaven—including my wife, Ruth.”

Pope Gregory the Great gave the same answer in his Dialogues, and went further. The blessed, he wrote, “know not only them with whom they were acquainted in this world, but also those whom before they never saw.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that in heaven the blessed “retain, or rather find, their true identity, their own name” (paragraph 1025). Mary heard hers in the garden. Our loved ones have not lost theirs.

Scripture gives no full account of memory after death, but it never shows the dead as blank. In Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham says to the rich man, “Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things” (Luke 16:25), and the rich man begs help for “five brethren” still on earth (16:28). It is a parable told to call the living to repentance, and we should not draw a map of the afterlife from it. Still, in the story Jesus chose to tell, the dead remember their lives and their families. In Revelation the souls of the martyrs know that their deaths are not yet answered and cry out, “How long, O Lord, holy and true” (Revelation 6:10).

Paul promises that we will know more, not less: “now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). God knows each of us now, completely and with love. Then we will know in the same way. And the love we had for one another goes with us, for “Charity never faileth” (1 Corinthians 13:8).

Doesn’t Isaiah say “the former shall not be remembered”?

Some readers find a verse that seems to say we will forget: “For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind” (Isaiah 65:17). The verse just before it says what is being forgotten: “because the former troubles are forgotten, and because they are hid from mine eyes” (65:16). Revelation, describing the same new heaven and new earth, names them: “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 21:4). Read in its place, the promise is that the troubles will be gone. Nothing in the chapter says the people we loved will be.

On this the churches differ. The Catholic Church teaches that the saints in heaven are close to us and pray for us. Those in heaven, the Catechism says, “do not cease to intercede with the Father for us,” and it gives the words of two saints at the end of their lives. St Dominic told his brothers, “Do not weep, for I shall be more useful to you after my death and I shall help you then more effectively than during my life.” St Thérèse of Lisieux said, “I want to spend my heaven in doing good on earth” (paragraph 956). The Catechism also says what the blessed do: they “continue joyfully to fulfill God’s will in relation to other men and to all creation” (paragraph 1029). The Church also prays for the dead, because “our prayer for them is capable not only of helping them, but also of making their intercession for us effective” (paragraph 958); why the dead need that help is the question of purgatory, below.

The Orthodox Church teaches the same closeness. A catechism long used in the Orthodox Church, the Longer Catechism of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow (1830), says there is unity between the Church on earth and the Church in heaven “by mutual communion with one another.” The saints, it says, “by their prayers and intercessions purify, strengthen, and offer before God the prayers of the faithful living upon earth,” and until the resurrection “the souls of the righteous are in light and rest, with a foretaste of eternal happiness.”

Most Protestant churches say less. The Westminster Confession teaches that at death the souls of the righteous, “being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God,” and it says nothing about whether they watch us. Hebrews tells us that “we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1), the faithful named in the chapter before, without saying what they see. Jesus did say that “joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth” (Luke 15:7). Seventh-day Adventists read Scripture another way: they teach that “death is an unconscious state for all people” until Christ returns, and Ecclesiastes says that “the dead know not any thing” (Ecclesiastes 9:5).

Whatever else they teach, all of them read the same words of Jesus: God “is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him” (Luke 20:38). The people we miss are not lost to God.

Scripture does not say, and it is honest to admit it. What it does tell us is that heaven holds no grief. “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying” (Revelation 21:4). Paul, longing “to depart, and to be with Christ,” called it “far better” (Philippians 1:23). So our loved ones in Christ do not ache for us as we ache for them. Their love has not ended, for “Charity never faileth,” but it has been healed of sorrow.

Do they know that we miss them? The Catholic and Orthodox answers above say that the saints know us and pray for us, and on that teaching our love and our prayers reach them in God. Most Protestants say Scripture does not tell us what the departed know of us. All of them would agree that God knows. Jesus, standing at his friend’s grave, “groaned in the spirit, and was troubled,” and then “Jesus wept” (John 11:33, 35). The people who saw it said, “Behold how he loved him!” (11:36). Our missing is not a failure of faith. Paul asked only that we “sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.”

The Catholic Church teaches that “all who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.” It says, “The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned” (Catechism 1030–1031). So the Church offers prayers for the dead, “above all the Eucharistic sacrifice, so that, thus purified, they may attain the beatific vision of God” (1032).

The Orthodox Church also prays for the departed, and does not teach purgatory. Philaret’s catechism says that “such souls as have departed with faith, but without having had time to bring forth fruits worthy of repentance” may be “aided towards the attainment of a blessed resurrection by prayers offered in their behalf.” An Orthodox parish, St John the Evangelist, explains that “the Eastern Orthodox church does not believe in or uphold” the doctrine of purgatory, and that the Orthodox pray for the dead, “asking God’s mercy for their souls.”

Most Protestant churches teach neither purgatory nor prayer for the dead. The Westminster Confession says that at death the souls of the righteous go to heaven and the souls of the wicked to hell, and adds, “Besides these two places, for souls separated from their bodies, the Scripture acknowledgeth none.” Prayer, it says, is to be made “for all sorts of men living, or that shall live hereafter: but not for the dead.”

Jesus answered this himself. Some Sadducees, “which say that there is no resurrection,” brought him a riddle about a woman who had been married to seven brothers in turn, and asked whose wife she would be (Matthew 22:23–28). He told them, “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:29–30).

Marriage, then, belongs to this life. Jesus says nothing in that answer about husbands and wives becoming strangers, and everything Scripture says about knowing and being known still holds for them. Many widows and widowers ask this question with an ache, and the love they gave and received is the charity that “never faileth.” Will there be marriage in heaven? looks at the question more closely.

After a death, some of us feel a loved one near, or wonder about a bird that comes to the window. Scripture does not promise messages from the dead, and it forbids seeking them. Among the practices the Law calls “an abomination unto the Lord” are the “consulter with familiar spirits” and the “necromancer” (Deuteronomy 18:11–12). In Jesus’ parable, when the rich man asks that Lazarus be sent back to warn his brothers, Abraham refuses: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead” (Luke 16:31).

Missing someone is no sin, and neither is feeling them close. What God gives us is a way to stay near them through him. Catholic and Orthodox Christians pray for their departed. Christians of every tradition thank God for them. A cardinal at the feeder can be a reminder of the Father who feeds the birds, and what it means when God sends a cardinal takes up that question gently.

Paul’s comfort is spoken of those “which sleep in Jesus,” and some who read this are afraid for someone whose faith they never saw. Scripture does not ask us to pronounce a verdict on them. The Catechism, after teaching the gravest things about sin, says that “we must entrust judgment of persons to the justice and mercy of God” (paragraph 1861). Abraham, pleading for the people of Sodom, asked the question we may ask: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25). We can leave the people we love with him. He knew them before we did.

Mary left the garden and went to tell the disciples “that she had seen the Lord” (John 20:18). She had come looking for a body, and she found a friend who knew her name. That is the hope we carry to every grave: “Wherefore comfort one another with these words.”

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