Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

I couldn't think of a better way to introduce some reflection on these readings this weekend than with a story I'm sure I've used before. But it's a classic, and the classics bear repeating. It's about a priest friend of mine who battled for a number of years with cancer before he died. And I remember the first time he was hospitalized, and underwent surgery for that cancer. One of the teachers in the grade school, first grade I think it was, made it a sort of class project to have the children make up get well cards and send them to him in the hospital. Most of them had the usual get well, best wishes sort of message, but one in particular was positively profound. I remember it because he saved that card and showed it to any visitors eagerly. On the front of the card was a little drawing of a cross, and on the inside were the words, "I hope you get better, but if you don't have a nice death."

Now, that child was a Christian. Though unwittingly, his card was perhaps one of the most profoundly Christian things we can wish for one another. Because it is simply the human condition that sooner or later, every one of us will die. More than likely, before our own death, we will experience the death of someone we love. Death is perhaps the one truly universal truth. So much so, some contend, that consciously or not, everything we do, every attitude we assume, every value choice we make is to some degree colored by our consciousness of death. It is really true, then, that the model, the measure of a person's ability to build a life with purpose and meaning, is the ability to see purpose and meaning in death.

And so if we as Christians have been called, as indeed we have been, to build a special kind of life, a life that differs from that of someone who does not know Christ, it is so at least in part because we as Christians have been given the truth, have been offered a promise that gives us a special understanding of the mystery of death.

It is an understanding that begins to be laid out for us in these readings today. I said that the way a person views death colors, flavors, determines really, the way in which he views life. And that is certainly true. It is true for those, and God knows there are many, who are unable to get beyond the immediate experience of the senses, those who judge truth only on the basis of what they can see and feel and hear. Those are people who have chosen to live, who can only be comfortable, in a very small world, small in space and small in time. Because in their experience, death is simply the end. Whatever we may have been, when we die we simply cease to be, and at that point it really doesn't make very much difference whether what we were was a human being, a horse or a tree.

For such people, life usually becomes a matter of a frantic grasping for pleasure on the one hand, after all when you are dead, you are dead, so get all you can right now, and on the other hand a sort of fatalistic acceptance of life's difficulties and challenges... an attitude of, "It's all going to end anyway, so why bother?" If death is, as it seems to be, the end, it is a thing to be hated, feared, avoided at all costs when possible, and simply endured when not.

But, over the ages, most human beings have strongly resisted the temptation to believe that death is what it seems to be. There seems to be born into us, as a part of human nature, an inability to live very comfortably with the idea that we shall cease to exist. It is an inability that springs not simply from a fear of death, and a wish to avoid it, but rather from a truly natural affirmation of life. An inability, an unwillingness, then, to believe that human life, which we experience as so good and valuable, could really be as insignificant as death makes it seem.

So even without the fullness of God's word, of revelation, human beings have struggled with the notion of life after death, and in the process have developed some very complex and beautiful bodies of thought. For the most part, these have pretty well reflected the human hopes and experiences of each age and culture. For the expanding, aggressive, war like Norsemen, and Northern Europeans, heaven was Valhalla, the hall of warriors, one long riotous victory feast. For the more sensual Mediterranean cultures, heaven was Eden, Paradise, the Elysian Fields, Olympus, the Perfumed Garden. For the more contemplative religions of the East, heaven was Nirvana, a state of perfectly serene spiritual union with all of reality, an absolute lack of conflict.

So even on their own, even before God chose to speak, human beings drew from their understanding of death, an understanding of life, a purpose, a goal, some emotional and spiritual armor with which to face the demands and the difficulties that life would bring.

But none of these were enough. Surely each of these insights, and others even more profound, each captured and reflected a bit of the truth. But none of them were true enough. None of them could spur humankind to the kind of life that God wished. For that, humanity needed to know the whole truth, the fullness of revelation. Only when a person could truly die as Gods creature, would he be able to truly live as God's creature.

And so God did speak. The revelation was given. In the prophets, in the Psalms, in the heroic witness of people such as the martyrs, in this first reading, martyrs a hundred years before Christ was even born, who chose to endure death, not only for the sake of a cause or a principle, but for the sake of their own personal future. And then finally and most fully, in Christ Himself, the Father revealed an attitude toward death, an understanding of death that was new and different from anything to which humankind on its own could ever conclude.

At that heart of that understanding was the promise that death was not the end of the person... a promise hinted at a thousand times before, but given fully and completely in Christ. Personal immortality. Each of us was born a human being, a mysterious combination of physical and spiritual life. And over the years, each of us has become a unique human being, unlike any other, with particular talents, particular virtues, particular tastes, particular faults, that make each of us one of a kind. We have, each of us, set for ourselves a pattern of growth that is our own, that can never be duplicated by any other human being. And that is a pattern of growth that will never end, will never be erased. A Christian knows that he will stay forever a human being, this particular human being, this unique, mysterious combination of physical and spiritual life.

That is the heart of the mystery of a Christian death. We will never stop being ourselves. What we accomplish, what we make of ourselves, remains with us forever. The strengths that we develop, the good that we do, the bonds that we manage to forge between ourselves and other human beings, the mutual exchange of love and support and satisfaction that these bonds make possible, all of these are eternal. So for a Christian, death is best understood not so much by the familiar image of falling asleep, but rather one of waking up. Death is the point in our lives at which we realize that without these strengths and accomplishments, and bonds of love, we cannot be happy. The point at which we realize that if we have built them, we will live forever in the joy and satisfaction that they bring... and that if we have failed to build them, we will live forever with that failure. Heaven or hell is not nearly so much a matter of God rewarding or punishing, as it is a matter of simply living forever with what we make of ourselves.

Well, pretty clearly, such a notion of death must give direction to how a Christian lives. In everything that we do, we either build or destroy ourselves to some degree. We either build or destroy our ability to relate knowingly and lovingly to God's creation. And in the light of our awareness of what death means, it becomes literally infinitely important that we build such ability. It becomes the only thing that is important. The heroism of the martyrs in this first reading did not come from any sort of fatalism, any notion that life was not really very important anyway. Quite the opposite. It came from the notion that life is infinitely important, and that it was far wiser to live with pain for a few moments than to live with failure and infidelity forever. The Sadducees in the Gospel who try to ridicule Christ with their exaggeratedly complicated legal question about the woman who was married seven times are turned away pretty sharply with the reply that every human bond is of infinite value, but that no human relationship now can even begin to mirror the intensity with which we shall experience such bonds after death.

So. The child who wrote so candidly to my friend was right. For us, for Christians, death is simply one of the things we are called to do, and do well, as we grow, as we become more and more what the Father intended us to be from the beginning. As we are told in the last line of the Gospel this morning, we are a people called to live in His company. And that is a life that can never end.

Readings: 2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14; 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5; Luke 20:27-38