Homily for 32d Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
32d Sunday of Ordinary Time

Nov. 6, 2022
Luke 20: 27-38
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx

(by James Tissot)

“Those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead … are children of God because they are the ones who will rise” (Luke 20: 35-36).

This encounter between Jesus and the Sadducees presents us with a significant Christian teaching concerning eternal life.

The Sadducees were the religious conservatives of Jesus’ time, unwilling to recognize any teaching not found in the 1st 5 books of the Scriptures, the books attributed to Moses.  But by the 1st century, many of the Jews, including the Pharisees, had recognized the scriptural authority of the historical writings, the Psalms, and the prophets and had also come to a belief in resurrection of the dead, as witnessed in our 1st reading, which is an except from a long story recounting the heroic deaths of 7 brothers and their mother during the persecution of the Jews ordered by their pagan Greek rulers in the 2d century B.C.

In the ancient world even people who believed in some kind of an afterlife imagined that it would be very much like this life.  The Egyptians, for instance, and nomadic tribes in the steppes of Asia buried rulers and nobles with supplies of food, clothing, weapons, hunting gear, even horses and household slaves, so that they’d have whatever they might need in their future life.  When the French missionaries in Canada spoke to some of the Indian tribes about heaven, their listeners lost interest on being told there wouldn’t be any hunting or sexuality; Jesus teaches about the latter in today’s gospel.

Some people today don’t want to imagine heaven without their beloved pets.  Even Pope Francis addressed that issue in 2014, proposing to a boy mourning for his dog that heaven might have room for non-human creatures.

I like the idea of having dogs and cats and other non-human friends in eternity.  Jesus, however, is teaching us that the relationship we’ll enjoy with God in the life of the resurrection will be radically different from our earthly experience.  It’s something we can’t quite wrap our minds around.  We’ll have bodies, but marriage, i.e., sexual expression, won’t figure into our existence because death will be done away with, and thus the need to procreate new persons.  We’ll have a permanent relationship with God as his sons and daughters, members of his family.  We’ll enjoy some kind of unending, ecstatic union with God rather than the kinds of relationships we’ve experience here below.

That all sounds pretty abstract, of course.  But I look forward to a new and youthful body that will be like Jesus’ after his resurrection (recall the stories in the Gospels of his appearances to the apostles):  no more pain, no more illness, no more temptations to sin because being with Jesus and his Father, united with them by the Holy Spirit, will be all-consuming and all-satisfying, much more even than the time we spend now with people we love most dearly.

In this life we all experience moments of intense pleasure from being in the company of people whom we love or much admire; or taking part in such experiences as listening to great music, contemplating a great work of art, watching our team win a championship and feeling bonded to them and our fellow fans.  But all of that comes to an end, doesn’t it?  It’s not eternal.

We seek the eternal.  We hunger for eternal life, a life that exceeds our present experience.  You know the joke about people who are happy to wake up in the morning with aches all over their bodies—because it means they’re still alive!  But we want to live without the aches, don’t we?  And without sorrow or fear or anxiety, without guilt or shame, without arguments, without politics!  That’s the eternal life hidden behind Jesus’ words that in the resurrection there’s no need for marriage.  Sacramental marriage is a sign—a beautiful sign—of the permanent, self-sacrificing love between Jesus Christ and his Church.  In heaven we’ll experience that perfect union of love first-hand and not need a sign.  Adoring God, we’ll dwell in perfect, lasting harmony with him and all his friends, all our sisters and brothers in the same household, all the saints, all those redeemed by our Lord Jesus, who came to seek and to save what was lost, as we heard in last Sunday’s gospel (Luke 19:10), to give us the fullness of life.  We’ll know, we’ll experience, that God is the God of the living—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob (20:37-38), and all those whom God embraces in love.