32nd Sunday Year C
See Commentary on Luke 20:27-38 in Luke 20:27-40
Homily 1 - 2007
What’s new? Even in Jesus’ time, some believed in resurrection, some didn’t. Sir Kerry Packer didn’t believe in God; he certainly didn’t believe in life after death. I gather that what mattered for him was that his media empire continue. Not altogether unlike the Sadducees. They were wealthy, and their interests centred on the continuation of their bloodline and of their property. Kerry was not alone. A lot of other people don’t believe either in God or in life after death.
Jesus was different. He believed in God. He also believed that God was passionately interested in how we live; indeed, that God made us in God’s own image, and that the God, in whose image we are made, is love. So he believed, too, that human life is all about loving, so, about respecting, relating and caring – so, about living justly, compassionately, in harmony, peacefully, in freedom.
But as Jesus lived his life, he saw that God’s way of love was not the usual pattern of life in the world. In fact, that those who chose to love justly, compassionately, caringly, and non-violently were often themselves exploited, oppressed, ridiculed, and trod on. To get on in the world, you had to look after yourself. The common good of all had to give way to self-interest, to family honour, to family interest, and, in more recent times, to national interest.
Fortunately, Jesus did not fall for that temptation. Jesus was totally convinced of resurrection. It was the only way in which God’s way could make sense. Because he believed in resurrection, he could unshakeably continue to live lovingly, even though he knew he would be killed for it.
Each of us has chosen to follow Jesus. Though none of us has seen the resurrected Jesus, we believe that he lives on. We believe in our own resurrection because, like Jesus, we know that it’s the only context in which God’s way of loving makes sense. We know in our bones that human life is all about loving. We’re made for something far better than “the law of the jungle”. If Jesus’ way is not true, then life doesn’t make sense.
Jesus did not speak of on-going life after death in terms of “souls”. Being Jewish, he spoke of resurrection. He thought in terms of real persons, whole persons. He saw risen life as an extension, and intensifying, of earthly life.
What we do with ourselves here in this life remains with us in the next stage of the adventure - enhanced, forgiven, healed – but “us”. In John’s Gospel, (and probably Luke’s) the risen Jesus still carried, and could still show, his scars.
Life after death will simply enable the total triumph of love. There we shall be empowered to say to each other, indeed, to everyone without exception: I forgive you. Thank you. I am sorry, profoundly sorry. I love you. I rejoice with you. Let’s rejoice together – in each other, and in God..
We shall continue to explore the mystery of unconditional love – accepting it, offering it. We shall have eternity to explore the infinite mystery of God, who is simply sheer, incandescent, personal love. The details escape us, but the underlying love-saturated reality is certain.
Homily 2 - 2010
Last Monday was All Souls Day; Tuesday was All Saints. A couple of weeks ago we celebrated St Mary McKillop – and every Eucharist is a celebration of Jesus’ resurrection and of all that that means.
In a sense, we have been looking ahead. But, in Jesus’ mind, the whole point of looking ahead is to look more seriously at the task of the now. We don‘t know much about the future and what awaits us, - and, unfortunately, the way that some people talk about it serves only to trivialise it.
When Jesus spoke of eternal life, sometimes he used the future tense; sometimes he used the present tense. We can live eternal life now. In fact, how we live eternal life now determines how we will live eternal life then. What matters is that we are clear about what constitutes eternal life in our present ways of living.
As far as Jesus was concerned, eternal life – whether lived before death or after death – consists, primarily, in believing in him and believing in the Father. But when Jesus talked about believing in him, he didn’t mean believing in statements about him – believing doctrines or dogmas. Even the devil believes in that sense. What Jesus meant by believing in him was trusting him, entrusting ourselves to him, living like him. committing ourselves to his project, to his yearning for the Kingdom: thy Kingdom come on earth – just as it is in heaven. That kind of living is eternal on this side of the grave and on the other side of the grave.
As far as Jesus was concerned, living like him meant simply: Love one another as I have loved you. Living eternal life is simply living lovingly – and that’s essentially relationally. Living lovingly is a community affair.
It begins with being loved. It moves beyond that to believing we’re loved, to accepting being loved, to being transformed, being created and freed by love in the process. And the circle is then completed as we become loving and give love. Originating and starting it all is God who is love. When we love – truly love – it’s ultimately God’s love that empowers us – whether we realise it or not. Believing in Jesus, entrusting ourselves to Jesus, means stepping into, being plunged into, being swept up into the infinite ocean of loving energy that is God: God is love.
Loving, now, in this life, makes us who we are. It is this us that lives into eternity, and eternity will simply be more of it – but at an intensity that we can never imagine. Heaven, if we choose to use the familiar word, is simply relationship – people living in love. Saints are simply people alive with love – with the love that all originates in God.
If we want to think of Purgatory in this context, Purgatory is the in-between stage when our hearts, that struggle to open totally in love in this phase of life, painfully let go of all that hindered the surrender we didn’t make – the hurts, the fears, the self-interest, the pride – until finally we can step, liberated and complete, into the fullness of love that is heaven.
That is our destiny. It has already begun. And its texture is being shaped precisely by how we are choosing to live now.
Homily 3 - 2013
Let’s reflect on today’s Gospel … Sadducees had no sense of life after death, no belief in resurrection – which they saw as new-fangled ideas. Moses had said nothing about it – so that was that! Yet the thought of death haunted them a bit – all over? finished? Their way of cheating death was to have their name, their memory, their wealth, continued through their children. Descendants were everything. For these people, marriage was all about children, begetting them, forming them, continuing, through them, the memories and the traditions. Unlike them, a lot of other Jews had begun to believe in life after death, resurrected life after death. So there were disagreements and arguments.
Jesus’ contribution was simple: Moses had, in fact, spoken about life after death – but the Sadducees had not noticed it. Once, when speaking to Moses, God had identified himself by saying: “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob”. He didn’t say: ‘I used to be’ … but “I am. I still am”. So, if God is still their God, still their friend, then necessarily they are somehow still alive. As Jesus said, “God is God not of the dead but of the living.” And then went on to add: “To God everyone is in fact alive.” I’m alive. Mum’s alive; Dad’s alive. My priest friend, Frank, who died two weeks ago is alive. As far as God is concerned, they are as alive as they ever were.
During November, we have the wonderful tradition of praying for the dead. Mind you, we have about as much concept of life after death as an unborn child might have of life after birth, of life outside the familiar, warm, comfortable [even if getting ever more cramped] womb. But some ideas are more helpful than others. We can imagine it as young children might imagine it; or as adolescents might; or as people who have never been in love might … but the most helpful view is the more mature view, which organises life from the standpoint of personal relationship and of love. Adolescents are concerned about fitting reward and punishment. People who love find meaning in acceptance and in forgiveness. God relates [at the least!] as one who loves. As Jesus said, “I call you friends”. After his crucifixion, and the disciples’ defection and denial, he kept on calling them “brothers” and wishing them “Peace!”. People who have learnt to love can do that. People who have learnt to love want to do that.
What is Purgatory about? I think of it as the ‘Finishing School’ in loving. I hope that is what it is it, because, by the time I die, I shall still be far, far short of my full potential to love. Why don’t I love? more? Basically, I suppose, it is because it hurts. As Jesus once put it, I have to die to myself, to my self-absorption, to my desperate sense of self-importance, to my constant self-judgment, my inertia… my fear of getting too close, of being too vulnerable; but I hope I get the chance to continue working at it after death. We are not able to grow in love in isolation. There will have to be others there – ones easy to love and others harder to love. But they will all be trying the same thing. We shall be doing it together.
I do not believe any more that there are “abandoned souls in Purgatory” – certainly not abandoned by God, or by Jesus who died for them, or by the others there with them. That is what the Communion of Saints is about. Nor are they helpless or paralysed, waiting for God to intervene independently of them and make them able to love fully [which is what heaven surely is], in a flash, without cooperation on their part. Still, when others love us, they help us to love. That is where our prayers for the dead fit in. They are our acts of love, our reaching out in love. Good for them! Good for us!
Homily 4 - 2016
God is God, not of the dead but of the living. To God everyone is living. Obviously, we human persons see a quite clear difference between being dead and being alive. However, it would seem that as far as God is concerned, the difference is not really significant. Our faith allows us to define death differently from those who do not have faith. We do not see death as the end of our life. We see it as marking a transition to a different way of being alive.
Let me share with you the way I understand things. What we call heaven, hell and purgatory can be understood as different experiences of being alive. Heaven is the experience of loving and being loved to their fullest extent. Hell is the experience of refusing definitively both to receive love and to give it. Purgatory is the experience of deepening our capacity to receive and to give love more completely. Receiving and giving love happen in relationship – with God, especially, and with other people. Hating, but even withholding love, choosing neither to receive nor to give love, happens in and creates isolation from others. It is what we refer to as the experience of hell, a deliberate and total alienation, including from God.
Purgatory may be the immediate post-death situation for most of us. Purgatory is like “Finishing School”. We die incomplete. We die without having succeeded in, perhaps not even having wanted to, love completely, because loving has a cost. It involves trust, a letting go of complete control, a dying to ourselves and to our controlling egos. Obviously, it is painful – which is why we hold back. But we shall not avoid the pain for ever. That on-going spiritual dying-to-self will be part of the task of purgatory. Before we become ready to experience the clear vision of the God who loves us totally and unconditionally, we need, we want, to allow our capacity for loving to develop completely.
A two-directional flow of energy is needed in that growth, as we know from our experience of growth here in phase one on earth. We need the courage to receive love from others; we need the courage to give love to others. That two-fold flow of energy will be the experience of purgatory, but it will be accompanied by the two-fold struggle to let it happen. And everyone experiencing purgatory with us will be busy about the same task – hesitantly relating to each other in ever deepening love. We shall be working with real people – which may also involve the task of mutual reconciliation, of unconditionally forgiving on the one hand and being genuinely sorry on the other.
I wonder which will be more difficult? To receive love, unconditionally and without constraint? or to give love, unconditionally and without constraint? Both require that we be prepared to empty ourselves of all self-interest and self-concern. To receive love, we need first to be empty; and in the process of giving love, we inevitably do empty our true selves.
It makes a lot of sense to begin the process straightway! Eternal life has already begun. It grows in intensity as we live more and more like God.
Homily 5 - 2019
In today’s Gospel, the Sadducees had a problem. They were the conservative wing of the Jewish people – generally from wealthy families, many of them influential priests, mainly resident in Jerusalem, prepared to collaborate with the Roman occupying power, satisfied with the status quo and opposed to anything new. From the religious point of view, they accepted only the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, allegedly composed by Moses. Everything else, even the prophets, were too risky, too “avant garde” for them. They had no time for religious ideas about life after death, for example, which had begun to gain ground among the population generally only over the last couple of centuries.
What is more, even when the Sadducees read the first five books of the Bible, they read them with a fundamentalist, literalist, mindset. It was their literalist understanding of one of those five books, the Book of Leviticus, that was responsible for the absurd scenario they posed to Jesus about the woman consecutively married to seven brothers.
Jesus accepted those same five books – and the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures as well; but Jesus did not accept them literally. He read them, not fixated on the words, but on the meanings conveyed by the words, the meanings and values behind the words. He used his imagination. He used his intelligence. He drew on his sense of the meaning and thrust of the Scriptures as a whole. Matthew quoted him as saying in his Sermon on the Mount, "I have come, not to destroy the Law but to fulfill it.” In the process, Jesus actually contradicted the literal wording of some of the commands – and promptly proceeded to made clear his sense of the meaning and the values defended by those quite inadequately worded laws [‘You have heard it said… but I say to you”].
In today’s passage, Jesus rigorously engaged with the Sadducees who went no further than the literal wording of the Law and could not, would not, capture its sense, the values it was meant to sensitise them to. Still, not wanting just to win the argument but hoping to win them to an immensely richer sense of their God, he was prepared to base his further comment on an incident contained in the Book of Exodus, the second of those five books that the Sadducees accepted, longing to open them to the wonderful sense of life beyond death to be lived with that God.
Exodus has the incident where Moses was confronted by a bush on fire, which burned but was not consumed by the fire. God spoke with Moses from the bush. In their conversation, in answer to a request made by Moses, God identified himself. “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob”. What might have been a meaning beyond the words? Jesus was inviting them to look.
Yahweh, the God of the three Hebrew patriarchs, was not like the gods of the people of the surrounding cultures in their settled towns and cities, with their cultivated fields and herds of livestock. Their main interest was the ongoing fertility of their crops and animals, assured by the regular cycle of the seasons, and the unchanging certainty of the status quo. Their gods were fertility gods.
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were wandering nomads. Their God was not a fertility god, not a God of the status quo. Instead, their God spoke to them of a future, a blessed future, where not only they would be blessed but all the nations of the earth would be blessed through them. Yahweh was a God of hope, a hope in which Abraham, Isaac and Jacob would continue to share. At the burning bush, God did not speak of them as dead men, but as somehow living exemplars of anticipation and hope.
But, to see that, we need to read the story with imagination, as we might read poetry; and from an intimate sense of God – as Jesus did.
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.