November 6, 2016

 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time C 2 Maccabees 7: 1-2, 9-14; 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5; Luke 20: 27-38. The question is always the same: What was it like…. When we talk with people who have just had an experience we never had…or a place we always wanted to visit or the like. In today’s Gospel the Sadducees ask Jesus about the afterlife, about heaven, and they just did not believe in it and wanted to trick Jesus. Now at the time of this ‘encounter’ between Jesus and the Sadducees, the belief in the resurrection of the dead was a relatively new feature in Judaism. The Sadducees were very traditional, staying within the first five books of the Bible—the Pentateuch—the ones that Moses wrote. They were very conservative, belonged to the aristocratic class and had special access to the Temple in Jerusalem. The issue at conflict was known as ‘levirate marriage’. It was a practice to protect the future of a widow whose husband had died without producing a male heir. They used this example to mock out Jesus and to trick Him. Jesus doesn’t play into their game. They felt that resurrection is where life is given back to the dead person and life then continues. Jesus points out the resurrection is a new reality. It is really incomprehensible to our earthly minds as St. John Paul II said in his Theology of the Body. We are headed to a life AFTER death. It is totally different. Nothing that we have experienced here can prepare us for that…risen life is a new dimension. Heaven is for all. People ask me what area the best books to read about Jesus: without the doubt, at the top of the list is The Lord by Msgr. Romano Guardini. He wrote a companion book, The Meditations of The Christ, Model of all Holiness that I will quote now. “What is Heaven? When one asks a child that question, the child will just point upward: ‘Up there.’ We should not be too swift to laugh. The child means more by those words than may be established by the metamorphosis of scientific investigation; that ‘up there’ which cannot exist because there is no such thing as up and down in the last analysis—if the child were questioned more exactingly, the answer would be: ‘Heaven is where God lives.’ … Perhaps it can be said that Heaven is on its way to us as long as we do not keep it at a distance by our own actions. I believe it is no fantasy or delusion to think this way: that our whole Christian life consists in having Heaven continually striving to catch up with us, close in on us. Every Christian act, belief, love, sacrifice, struggle, every perseverance and courageous performance—all these things make possible the approach of Him who desires only to come forward. But all coldness, indifference, slothfulness, weakness, pride, covetousness— everything sin is called—forces Him back, bars the road to Him. And Heaven fights. Heaven wants to come to us. For Heaven is only God’s love come home. What a tremendous thought it is: Heaven on the way to meet me, relentlessly advancing toward me, and God’s eye is upon me. And to think of the mightiness of the will behind it! The monumental strength of that desire? From what depths comes that petition: ‘Thy kingdom come’—the kingdom f Heaven! When is Heaven truly and completely present? It is when all heaviness is gone; when all sluggishness has been overcome, all wickedness, coldness, pride, irritation, disobedience, and covetousness; when there is no danger anymore of falling away; when grace has made one’s whole being open up, body and soul, to the ultimate profundities; when there is no further danger that it will all close in again, become hardened in ways of evil; when all work to be done on earth is finished, and all guilt has been paid by repentance. What all this means is : after death. After death—when time is no longer; when everything is in the everlasting now; when nothing can change anymore, but the creature stands illuminated by the light of eternity, before God—at that time,everything will be open, and will remain so. That is being in Heaven. The day He left this earth, Jesus went to Heaven, His body and His soul. All earthly heaviness vanished. All limitations of being in this place or that place dropped away. Every burden of earthly need fell away There was nothing more closed off, not even for the body Everything was open. Everything about Him made its way in the overmastering presence of His Father. But here is the mystery: the very moment that He leaves us, He returns: ‘I am going away’ to the Father; but He added immediately ‘and coming back to you.’ And in Matthew’s Gospel, He told them, ‘Behold I am with you all the days that are coming, till the consummation of the world.’ And the one statement is made true by the other. He went away from us, His body also, to Heaven, to the pure and open presence of His Father which He has directed toward us. He who was the intermediary between the Father and us—‘the way, the truth and the life’—has entered completely into this love. Now He is everywhere the Father’s love is, and so He is with us. He is gone from the visible, transient here and now. But now, from there, and because He is there, He can, through the love of the Father, be with each of us and with the Father also. He is in upon us, bring with Him the presence of the Father, heaven. ‘See where I stand at the door, knocking; if anyone listens to my voice and opens the door, I will come into visit him, and make my supper with him, and he shall sup with me. ‘Supper’ is the extravagant superabundance of God’s accessible presence bursting in, blessed, satisfying, making drunk with all the drunkenness of love. This is how we properly understand Heaven. It is that close presence wherein the Father stands in relation to Jesus Christ. And Heaven for us will be participation in this intimacy of love. This condition is already beginning; it approaches close; now in peril, it is fought over, lost, and won back again. So it goes with our Christian life.” We waste so much time wondering if we can get in heaven instead of listening to what Jesus said about living and loving. We experience God’s love and the truth of Heaven in the gifts of compassion and mercy, of understanding and support that continue long after we realize these. The simple signs of love: from a hug, to a compliment, to a gesture, to a helping hand show us that we are living the Resurrected Jesus, we are living the reality of Heaven. God is with us and we are sharing God. Jesus is constantly expanding our narrow vision of God showing us that love is God, forgiveness is God, mercy is God, compassion is God. And God needs me. So I reflect on: • The devil lies to us tempting us that there is nothing wrong with violating God’s commands. • The devil tempts us to busy ourselves so that at the end of the day , we are just too tired or too distracted to spend time with God. • Lord, I need you today to come and strengthen me against temptation. • Do I ever judge people too quickly? And later on when I get to know them, I see they are much different and nice people? • How do I prepare for eternal life? How do my relationships with others enter into this preparation?