Homily for 32d Sunday in Ordinary Time

Homily for the
32d Sunday
in Ordinary Time
Nov. 11, 1990
1 Thess 4: 13-18
Holy Cross, Fairfield, Conn.

This weekend, Nov. 4-6, 2011, I was taking part in a Boy Scout trek-o-ree. My homily to them, as well as to the patients and staff at St. Vincent's hospital this morning, was delivered from a mental outline only. Actually, I'd jotted a few notes on Thursday evening, which I stuck in a book that I proceeded to misplace until this afternoon. So--here's an "oldie" for you.

“We would have you be clear about those who sleep in death, brothers; otherwise you might yield to grief like those who have no hope” (1 Thess 4: 13).

Lack of hope—despair—is one of the great anxieties of our age. In a secular sense, we see it in low voter turnout, as people groan, “What’s the use of voting!” In an existential sense, we see its results in therapists’ bank accounts, in asylums, in the drug markets, in the suicide rates.
People need hope; they always have.

In A.D. 627 the monk Paulinus visited King Edwin in northern England to persuade him to accept Christianity. He hesitated and decided to summon his advisers. At the meeting one of them stood up and said: “Your majesty, when you sit at the table with your lords and vassals, in the winter when the fire burns warm and bright on the hearth and the storm is howling outside, bringing the snow and the rain, it happens of a sudden that a little bird flies into the hall. It comes in at one door and flies out through the other. For the few moments that it is inside the hall, it does not feel cold, but as soon as it leaves your sight, it returns to the dark of winter. It seems to me that the life of man is much the same. We do not know what went before and we do not know what follows. If the new doctrine can speak to us surely of these things, it is well for us to follow it.”[1]

People need hope—hope of a better life next week or next year, hope of eternal life beyond our vale of tears. So the resurrection of Jesus Christ, his 2d coming as the climax of history, and the general resurrection are the core message of our faith, our surety against the sort of grief that leads to despair.

Such evidence as we have in the earliest letters of Paul—and 1 Thessalonians is apparently the oldest—suggest that the 1st Christians expected Christ to return in glory rather quickly. Many of them seem to have expected the 2d coming in their own lifetimes. It was, after all, only 20 years since Jesus had walked the roads of Galilee and the streets of Jerusalem.

This expectation caused a crisis of sorts for the new believers of Thessalonica. Obviously, Christians were dying before the Lord’s return. Did this have some negative effect on their final salvation? Paul reassures them with the bottom-line good news: “If we believe that Jesus died and rose, God will bring forth with him from the dead those who have fallen asleep believing in him” (1 Thess 4:14).

In the Christian’s view, sleep is an apt image for death. We speak of the saints falling asleep in the Lord. We call our burial places “dormitories”—which is what “cemetery” means. In Christ we have this confidence, this expectation, this hope.

We keep November as the month of the faithful departed. This bespeaks our hope for them. After Judas Maccabeus offered sacrifice for sinful Jews who fell in battle against their persecutors, the Bible tells us that Judas “acted in a very excellent and noble way, inasmuch as he had the resurrection of the dead in view; for if he were not expecting the fallen to rise again, it would have been useless and foolish to pray for them in death” (2 Macc 12:43-44).

God’s holiness allows no uncleanness, no imperfection, into his presence. God’s justice demands repentance and expiation for every sin, even the smallest. How then do we hold hope for our beloved dead, those who sleep in Christ but who had their human faults and committed sins against charity, chastity, justice, or human life the same as you and I, unfortunately, still do?

The doctrine of purgatory consoles us with this hope. Indirectly the Scriptures and, directly, the ancient Fathers of the Church like Sts. Cyprian and Augustine teach us that those who die in God’s love but with sin still to be atoned for cannot enter heaven until their sinfulness has been completely purged away by the fire of divine love. This doctrine of purgatory was confirmed by several ecumenical councils of the Church and most recently by Pope Paul VI.

So we believe there is heaven and eternal life for the just; hell and eternal anguish for the wicked; and a transitory state of cleansing before heaven for those whom we might call the “almost just” or the “sort of holy.” We are consoled that we can pray for these fundamentally good people and anticipate their eventual sharing in the risen glory of Christ. And indeed we are consoled that we too have this same hope, that our imperfections and daily sins can be purged and wiped away, either by charity in this life or by prayers of our friends after we too have fallen asleep in Christ.

[1] A New Catechism (NY: Herder, 1969) p. 3.