Learning about heaven!

Homily for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time C

7 November 2010

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center

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The Sadduccees are clever, but as usual they cannot trap Jesus. They try to show how the law of Moses, received from God, a law that commands brothers to marry a childless widow, makes the Resurrection of the dead messy. Yet Jesus easily shows how the reality of this world does not constrain nor dictate the reality of the world to come, the age of the Resurrection.

We are all going to die, so it is good that we pass on our life. We have a strong desire to have children. We in a sense live on through our children. We have an equally strong desire to know where we came from, who our ancestors are. We remember our beloved family members who have died, and they remain alive, so to speak, through our memory and in our hearts. The rule that a man must marry his brother's childless widow is thus a good rule, because a man who had no children before he died is in greatest danger of being forgotten, and thus being truly dead.

Marriage existed in the time of Jesus, as it exists today, as the optimal way that life is passed on, and as the optimal way that tradition and memory is passed on. With traditional marriage and family at risk today, we see not only a decline in the birth rate, we see family tradition and memory at great risk. Without strong families, it is easier to forget who our grandparents are, and who our great grandparents are, and these people do not live on in our memory as well, when half of children are born out of wedlock, a million children are aborted every year, and children can be manufactured in laboratories almost as easily as they can be conceived naturally. We are learning more everyday about how easy it might become for us to pass on life without the family, but can we pass on love and memory and tradition without the family? That is the question before us.

Marriage between a man and a woman constitutes the basic building block of a society not in order to constrain people,, but in order that a society may pass on life iwithin the context of authentic love. Marriage cannot guarantee that this always happens, but it remains the best opportunity to do so, for marriage corresponds to the natural complementarity and natural good of men and women and children, and thus contributes uniquely and significantly to the natural good of society. We know marriage is not necessary to pass on life, but we know that life is best passed on within such a complete and complementary covenant of love - husband and wife, mom and dad. Life is best passed on when those having children have first pledged sacrificial love to each other, and as much as possible, each child should have the privilege of being conceived within a complementary and sacrificial act of love between a husband and a wife. Now I'm talking optimally of course, and there are many beautiful children among us who are not conceived in this way, whom we must love nonetheless.

God has always desired to use human marriage, and has chosen to use it, as we see clearly in the law of Moses, to beget His own children, and married couples are truly co-creators with God. In this age when we all must die because we do not always love, marriage stands as a bulwark against the tendency to place the begetting of life before the pledging of love. Marriage creates the greatest opportunity for sacrificial love, and it is within this covenant that God desires to beget new life.

Yet God does not need marriage. He has chosen it as a favored instrument in this world, but in the beginning God created everything out of nothing. He breathed life into us when we were still dust. He can do so again. God choosen marriage, but He does not need it. The Maccabean martyrs that we hear about in the first reading knew this. They knew that it was alright if their lives were cut short, for if they existed in the heart of the King of heaven, they would live forever. It is He who begets life; everyone else is just a steward of the gift. If they existed in God's mind, as each one of us has from before we were born, they would live forever. The Maccabean martyrs thus had courage to shorten their lives, and to forego having wives and children themselves, knowing that even if their courageous memory was forgotten, even if their families forgot them, if their martyrdom helped God to remember them, then they would never be dead.

Celibacy then is a type of martyrdom, and unbloody one, and something that many men and women are called to by God for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Celibacy is a witness that if we exist in the heart of God, we are truly alive. Celibacy is a witness that life is not something that we can ultimately control, it is a gift. Life is something we can manipulate only temporarily, but the true reason there is life is because God is love. Life is good because God is love, and life without the love of God is just existence. Celibacy is a witness that the greater tragedy is not to lack a wife and children, it is to forget that we all exist in the heart of God, the author of all life.

So Jesus reminds the Sadducees that although the command to marry is a good one, it applies to this present age to ensure that the greatest amount of life is created with the greatest amount of love. But when love is perfect, marriage is no longer needed. We will love each other in heaven perfectly, in and through our bodies, but because love will have conquered death, we will have no need to pass on life physically, we will pass it on spiritually like angels, loving life into each other in communion with the Holy Trinity.

We call our priests fathers because in the Roman church, our priests are called to be models of this spiritual love. Even though physically they are barren, lacking wife and children, we call them fathers because they do indeed create life with God, they intensify life through spiritual love. Indeed, they are asked to be celibate in order that they might stand in the world exactly as Jesus did, without wife and children, and try to enter more deeply and perfectly into the creative but celibate love that is shared between the Father and the Son. We ask our priests to be as close to this love as they can be, before pronouncing the words of Jesus at the altar, words of love that truly beget the sacrament of eternal life.

Not only priests, but each one of us, is called to be made perfect in this spiritual love, and to become more and more disinterested in the kind of life that is merely existence, that can only be measured by length of days. We are to be interested only in life that flows from sacrificial love, and to learn well the command of Jesus that whoever seeks to save his life, will lose it. May we measure our lives more and more not by length of days, but by the opportunities that we have to love, and with our priests, point people always toward the eternal love that their Father has waiting for them in heaven, and toward the Holy Eucharist, where this eternal love begets eternal life.