32nd Sunday Year C - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2022

We Christians take it for granted that Jesus rose from death after his crucifixion. We also take it pretty much for granted that we ourselves shall eventually share in his resurrection after we die; just as we hope for our own loved ones who have already gone before us.

We talk of resurrection rather than mere immortality. Paul was ridiculed when he spoke to the self-styled intellectuals in Athens for insisting on Jesus’ bodily resurrection — even though many of them would have believed the possibility of the immortality of their personal souls. Jesus, and Paul after him, inherited the idea of bodily resurrection from their Jewish ancestors — yet the Jews arrived at this conclusion only late in their long history, spurred by their experience, a couple of centuries before Jesus, of their need to make sense of the cruel and totally undeserved martyrdom of many of the best and innocent among them. This persecution occurred particularly under the Greek despot, Antiochus Epiphanes — the king referred to in the colourful story in today’s First Reading. Surprisingly, perhaps, not all Jews came to accept resurrection. In today’s Gospel passage, we came across a group called Sadducees who strongly opposed the idea because Moses, their great leader and law-giver, had not talked about it.

In insisting on bodily resurrection rather than the immortality of the soul, Jewish believers, and Jesus with them, had a wonderfully integrated sense of the human person. Rather than thinking of a separate soul, they thought of us humans as essentially embodied souls, or ensouled bodies. The crucified and risen Jesus still carried, and emphasised, the bodily wounds he received during his crucifixion.

When we die, as one of the Eucharistic prayers puts it, “life is changed, not ended”. We remain essentially the identical person we always were.

Immortality, on the other hand, was a vaguer idea. There was no unanimity in people’s expectations; but generally life was diminished, and interpersonal comfort and support hardly featured.

Though we believe that with our bodily sharing in the resurrection life of the risen Jesus we retain our personal identity, we shall, however, experience profound change. We shall leave behind our familiar earthly experience of time and space, and move instead into the timeless, spaceless realm of eternity and sheer presence.

Here, our imaginations are of little help now in anticipating what awaits us. At most we can speak of the afterlife only in metaphors, radically inexact metaphors. This was the problem with the Sadducees in today’s Gospel. Jesus himself had problems clarifying things for them. He did say, “in the resurrection from the dead, [people] do not marry because … they are the same as the angels, and being children of the resurrection they are sons of God”. “… same as the angels”, “… children of the resurrection”, “… sons [and daughters] of God”. These words are familiar to us, but they are all metaphors. They certainly mean something — but their reality radically exceeds our capacity to understand, much less to experience; and will be infinitely richer.

We need to be careful when using our imaginations. The young men in today’s First Reading got it partly right; but they trusted too much in their imaginations. Consequently, their conviction sounds hardly unlike that of “suicide bombers” or ISIS terrorists.

On the other hand, Paul got it right. Our deep union already in the risen Christ, secured through our baptism, not only assures our continued relationship with him, but also with each other — a beautiful relationship already real during this stage of earthly life, and comfortingly reaching beyond the porous barrier of death. Through our prayers — which work two-way — we are as close to our deceased loved ones as we ever were; and the potential is there for that relationship to deepen and flourish exponentially.