21st Sunday Year A - Homily 7

Homily 7 - 2023

Today’s Gospel passage from St Matthew’s Gospel and the Second Reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans provide us with an invitation, an opportunity to reflect prayerfully about the mystery of death and dying. Michael’s absence from among us, too, this morning provides a fitting occasion, an appropriate context, to do just that.

In the Gospel, when speaking about the Church he would soon found, Jesus insisted that “the gates of the underworld can never hold out against it”. The “gates of the underworld” were the translator’s version of the Greek word Hades, which had no definite or agreed meaning, but served sometimes to refer to death or the domain of the demonic. Jesus, the Lord of Life, was maintaining that death as we experience it would be somehow overcome or eliminated. We would die, certainly, just as Jesus would die. But death would not remain “bad news”. We might say that death is not terminal.

One of the prayers used in the Liturgy of the Requiem Mass proclaims that, through death, “life is changed, not ended”. Life is not ended — though we are able at best to speak only metaphorically of what the changes might be. All we really know is that we don’t know much.

I love St Paul’s comments in today’s Second Reading: “How rich are the depths of God — how deep his wisdom and knowledge — and how impossible to penetrate his motives or understand his methods! Who could ever know the mind of the Lord? Who would ever be his counsellor? Who could ever give him anything or lend him anything? All that exists comes from him: all is by him and for him. To him be glory for ever!”

With death, we move out of time and space; and we believe that we move into eternity and infinity. We know the words. However, we have no sense at all of what the experience might be like, what those categories might mean relationally, and, even less, what they might feel like in practice.

So how do we face it? How do we cope?

Different people will cope differently, depending on our personal answers to another question — the one that Jesus put to his disciples in today’s reading: “You, who do you say I am”. Jesus’ question was not a Catechism question. Nor was he looking for a Catechism answer. Jesus was asking them what did he mean to them personally. He was not looking for a theological answer but essentially a relational one — expressed in their own words — not unlike Peter’s answer to Jesus’ question on the occasion when Jesus had shared with them his teaching on his presence in the Eucharist: “Will you also go away?” I simply love Peter’s down-to-earth answer: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

How we feel about the prospect of death and dying will be very much a factor of who Jesus is to us personally — how much we have quietly come to trust him, to understand his love. Naturally we may fear the possibility of physical pain or inconvenience or whatever. We may find it difficult to ignore the life-long habit of wondering whether we really merit eternity with God. But we can learn to ignore these fears, or to live with them, to rise above them — to the extent that we have learnt already to relax in God’s unconditional love.

We learn quietly to yearn to be with God.