Homily
for November 11, 2007
Liturgical Year C - Cycle I
32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
By Dcn. Ray Alcouffe Topic:
Resurrection
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“He
is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to
him, all are alive.”
Sometimes, when people read a good
book, especially some
kind of mystery, they jump to the back of the book to see what the
ending
is. Then they go to the beginning and
read about how the author got there.
That’s what we are doing when we think about the Resurrection of the
Body. Resurrection at the end of times,
spoken of in the Bible, is about the state of our future life with God,
known
as the end of times, where all our enemies are defeated, even death,
and we are
risen again with Jesus, united with our body into a new creation, a new
heaven
and a new earth. This is the perfect
state of being for us as human beings, the kind of existence God wills
as our
destiny. The question is how does this
happen, how do we get there? Well, now
that we have a glimpse of the end of the story, we need to go back to
the
beginning and reconsider what that destiny means. Not only that
but we must also consider
whether the way we live our lives matters as to the final outcome for
us. First of all, as we see from our
readings, we are
presented with two alternatives for life after death or immortality:
either it
exists or it does not. In the Jewish
context of the time, the Sadducees hold the second alternative - that
there is
no life after death - because the word of God, the Torah which is all
they
accept as God’s word, does not speak about such a life. The only
way a person can get a kind of
immortality is through their children, and their children’s children,
etc. That’s what marriage is for. This was tacitly behind
the example they
presented to Jesus where it was understood that they were talking about
bodily
resurrection and a resumption of our earthly relationships. For
them it is ridiculous to think that a
resurrected woman could have 7 husbands, QED.
The second alternative is that there
is life after death,
which leads to the final resurrection, is what Jesus is affirming.
He counters the Sadducees saying that upon
resurrection, in our final state, our relationships are not going to be
the
same but will be perfected in the face of no more death. Then
Jesus says that when God spoke to Moses,
an event recorded in the Torah, God speaks of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
as
alive. This talmudic argument leaves unsaid the punch line that Abraham
et al.
will be raised in the future. So ends
the argument, Jesus wins! Amen. In order to understand Jesus’ victory,
we need to be
aware that when Jesus and the Sadducees are speaking of resurrection,
they are
speaking of the final state of being for humans, the state of life
after
life-after-death. That is, the road to our everlasting life is a
two-stage process
after we die, life after death and then resurrection. The final
state, the Resurrection of the
body, has been the hope of Israel even before Jesus as clearly
demonstrated in
2 Maccabees by the woman and her 7 sons when they were ordered to
disobey the
commands of the Law and thus deny God.
They refused to do this and in their refusal they had to witness and
undergo horrible torture and mutilation and then death. As it says of
the third
son: “He put out his tongue when ordered and bravely held out his hands
as he
spoke these noble words: ‘It was from heaven that I received these; for
the
sake of his laws I disdain them; from him I hope to receive them again.”
This is a clear statement of the hope that
Israel held as God’s promise of resurrection of the body at the end of
time. In a way, there we have it. In
God’s view, we as humans undergo three
stages of life - our present earthly life (body and soul), life after
death
(just soul?), and then resurrected life, body and soul, both perfected.
But in our popular culture, sometimes even
our Catholic culture, we have much confusion when we think about
resurrection. We tend to equate
resurrection with life in the hereafter, in the sweet by and by, pie in
the
sky, floating around in the clouds in a spiritual, disembodied state
plucking
our harps. Either that or, God forbid, we wind up in Hell. This
was not the resurrection that motivated
the earliest Christians. This is not what Jesus’ resurrection was about.
Jesus attained the end state at his resurrection
and that’s what was offered to all who chose to follow his way.
That’s what motivated them - they saw with
their own eyes the destiny that had been the enduring hope of Israel;
and with
Christ, that destiny was now at hand.
The fullness of life, body and soul, with God in God’s dwelling place
was now at hand. How did this view of life in God
influence those early
Christians? The same way it influences us who embrace this hope - a
present
life that is transformed as we contemplate our destiny. As an
example: Back in the Middle ages, a
dispatcher went out to determine how laborers felt about their
work. He went to a building site in France. He approached
the first worker and asked,
“What are you doing?” “What, are you blind? I’m cutting
these impossible
boulders with primitive tools and putting them together the way the
boss tells
me. I’m sweating under this blazing sun.
It’s backbreaking work, and it’s boring me to death.” The dispatcher
quickly backed off and retreated to a second worker. He asked the
same question, “What are you
doing?” The worker replied, “I’m shaping
these boulders into usable forms, which are then assembled according to
the
architect’s plans. It’s hard work and sometimes it gets repetitive, but
I earn
5 francs a week and that supports the wife and kids. It’s a job.
Could be worse.” Somewhat encouraged, the dispatcher went on
to a third worker, “And what are you doing?” “Why, can’t you see?” said the worker
as he lifted his
arm to the sky, “I’m building a cathedral!”
So how is it that we are living our
life? As a toil? As a job until something better comes? Or
are we building a cathedral, our
destiny? Because we are building our
future, our destiny, by the way we live our lives whether we believe so
or
not. That’s why God has given us a
glimpse of our final destiny and why Jesus came to open it up to us.
Therefore, everything we do, think, desire in
both body and soul does matter. What our
resurrected body will be like is influenced by how we use this body in
the
present life - consider Jesus’ resurrected body and how it still
carries the
marks of his enduring suffering and death for us. That’s an
important point because our own
suffering in this life is something we’d dearly like to avoid. Yet as
we build
our future, our response to suffering is an essential part of the whole.
There are two kinds of suffering that are
involved - one is redemptive suffering, i.e. suffering or the sake of
others,
like Jesus’ or like a parent for a child.
The second is a purifying suffering, suffering that we undergo and from
which we can emerge for the better in our personal outlook. It
comes to us unbidden, unwanted and
sometimes it is devastating. But as we
lift our suffering up in faith to the Lord, it becomes a purification
for
us. Faith makes all the difference as to
whether suffering will lift us up, purify us in the eyes of God, or
whether it
will weigh us down and cause us to despair which is the killer of hope. We say in the Nicene Creed that: “We
look for (hope) the
resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” This
is the hope that, once accepted, shapes
our present lives giving everything we do ultimate meaning. In
this vein, there is a bit of spiritual
wisdom that goes: Sow a desire, reap a thought; sow a
thought, reap an act;
sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a
character, reap
a destiny. Amen! We close with an encouragement that we
just heard from
St. Paul:
“May our Lord Jesus
Christ himself and God our Father, who has loved
us and given us everlasting encouragement and good hope through his
grace,
encourage your hearts and strengthen them in every good deed and word.”