A Faithful Family To The End, Thirty-Second Sunday (C), November 6, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
November 6, 2022
2 Macc 7:1-2.9-14, Ps 17, 2 Thess 2:16-3:5, Lk 20:27-38

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• • Every November, the Church has us focus on the four last things — death, judgment, heaven and hell. At the beginning of the month, we celebrate All Saints’ Day, in which we remember and ask the intercession of all those who have arrived at the place to which we aspire. The next day we mark All Souls’ Day, and as we remember and pray for all the dead, especially those who are in need of our prayers and sacrifices to enter into paradise, we also ponder our own earthly end. Today’s readings strengthen those month-long meditations, teaching us some important truths about heaven and the path that will lead us there. We can focus on three crucial lessons.
  • The first thing is about the way to eternal life. In today’s Gospel. Jesus teaches us that it flows from a personal, truly vital, relationship with God. The God of the universe is not the deity of a cemetery of dead bodies, but, as Jesus says to the Sadducees, “the God of the living.” And not just the living “in general”: He is the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” which means, as Jesus illustrated, that these patriarchs — 1800 years deceased when Jesus was speaking — were not dead, but truly alive in God. The God who created us out of love did not create us with an expiration date to that life-giving love. His is a love that lasts forever. The whole point of our life is to receive and reciprocate that love, to accept his invitation to live in a deeply personal relationship with him that will not wane. The resurrection is not so much an event as a relationship with Jesus who says, “I am the Resurrection and the Life” (Jn 11:25). He declared during the Last Supper, “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and the one whom you have sent, Jesus Christ” (Jn 17:3). Eternity begins when we enter into the deep intimate friendship with God, when we join our life to his, because once he’s truly living in us, we are beginning to live forever. We are wasting the gift of our life if we’re not responding to God’s call to develop this deep communion of life and love with Jesus that gives us a foretaste of of heaven right now here on earth. If we’re not living in Jesus, we are, in a sense, dead. We’re walking cadavers. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, who knows and calls us by name, wants to be able to say that God is not merely the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but the “God of Roger, Marcella, Fatima and Claire.” If he’s able to say in truth about us that we are living in an intimate friendship with him as the “God of the living,” then because his life is eternal, we are already experiencing in embryonic form eternal life!
  • The second thing that Jesus teaches us in the Gospel is the connection between the sacraments — especially marriage — and heaven. Each of the sacraments is meant to help us enter into that living, loving, intimate relationship with God. Each of the sacraments is a bridge to the Trinity, to heaven, to eternity. That relationship begins on the day of our baptism, when God says of us, as he did of Jesus in the Jordan, “This is my beloved son [or daughter], in whom I am well pleased” (Mt 3:17). It grows every time he embraces us as his prodigal child in the Sacrament of Confession. It is intensified each time we have the awesome privilege of receiving the risen life, his resurrected body, blood, soul united to his divinity, within us in Holy Communion. In the Gospel, however, Jesus focuses specifically on the Sacrament of Marriage, on account of the disingenuous question asked by the Sadducees. The Sadducees didn’t believe in the possibility of heaven — because they only accepted the first five books of the Bible and erroneously believed that the Pentateuch was silent on eternal life — so they tried to entrap Jesus with the question of the woman who had been married successively to seven brothers. Because marriage is a one-flesh union brought about by God, then if there is a resurrection from the dead, the Sadducees suggested, this woman would be simultaneously joined in one-flesh to seven different men, something they thought totally absurd. Through their attempted reductio ad absurdum, they thought they had disproven the possibility of bodily resurrection.
  • In responding to their question, Jesus taught about marriage, Scripture, the power of God and eternal life. He indicated that the institution of marriage is a reality for this world, not the next. The reason for this is pretty clear. Marriage has a two-fold purpose, love and life, or, in more traditional terminology, the mutual sanctification of the spouses and the procreation and education of children. In heaven, there’s no purpose to marriage because men and women no longer need to be sanctified since they’re already saints; and there will be no new children because saints aren’t having babies and baptisms in the afterlife! But while there will be no marriage or conjugal consummation in heaven, there will certainly be love! Marriage in this world is meant to prepare spouses and children to enter into that love, the perfect love of God and the love of the communion of saints. And marriage is particularly well-suited to achieve this purpose. Marriage is meant to help husband and wife get out of themselves, out of their own selfishness, and enter into a loving communion, so that each of the spouses and their children might be better prepared to enter now and eternally into the Communion of Persons in Love who is the Blessed Trinity. If marriage and family life are lived in the way God intends, it is a school of love and one of the most powerful paths to heaven, which strengthens the couple and the family to remain faithful to God, in good times and bad, in sickness and in health, in poverty and prosperity.
  • Several years ago, commenting on this Gospel, Pope Francis said that Jesus turned the Saduccees’ logic right side up, helping them to begin with the life of heaven and from that orient our way of living on earth rather than start with life on earth and have that color our impression of impression. What will happen in heaven, Pope Francis said, is not just a “better version” of this life, but something beyond our imagination. What will happen is “exactly the opposite of what the Sadducees expected,” he said. “This life cannot be the standard for eternity: it is eternity, on the contrary, that illuminates our life on earth, and gives each of us hope. If we only look through human eyes,” the Pope continued, “we tend to say that the path of man goes from life towards death. But Jesus turns this perspective on its head and affirms that our pilgrimage goes from death towards a fuller life. So death is behind us, not in front of us,” the Pope concluded. “In front of us is the God of the living, the definitive defeat of sin and death, the start of a new time of joy and endless light. But already on this earth – in prayers, in Sacraments, in fraternity – we encounter Jesus and his love, and so we can get a small taste of the risen life.”
  • That brings us to the third lesson the readings today teach us in faith: keeping our eyes on heaven, we learn how to persevere in faith on earth, to persist with determination, to press on tenaciously in our union with Christ. St. Paul in today’s second reading prays for the Christians in Thessalonika that God who has given us “everlasting encouragement” will “guard you from the evil one” and “direct your hearts to the love of God and to the endurance of Christ.” He has given a courage that will not expire, he will protect us from the evil one, and direct our hearts to enduring love of God. Many times we will be tested, just like St. Paul’s was tested, but God wants to help us pass those tests.
  • That’s what today’s first reading is all about from the Second Book of Maccabees. In the second century before Christ, King Antiochus IV of Greece had wanted to impose the Greek religion on the Jews and to break down Jewish religious practice, so he commanded the Jews to eat pork, which was prohibited by the Mosaic Law. But today we meet a heroic family — a lionhearted mother and her seven valiant sons — who absolutely refused to do so, despite gruesome tortures and the specter of death. Theirs is a tremendous example of faithful love for God until the end. Eating pork might seem like a little thing to those who don’t care about being faithful in little things — some might even ask today, “Is remaining true to God even in terms of what we eat really worth dying for?” — but this family loved God so much and trusted in him so deeply that they were willing to be killed lest they displease God in any way. Unlike Adam and Eve, who believed the serpent’s lie that eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a small matter with no consequences, these brothers, cheered on by their mother, said the firmest possible “no” to these seductions. So great was their love of God, so intrepid was their faith in the resurrection, so ravenous was their hunger for eternal life that they were able to account all of their sufferings a small price to pay in order to obtain the eternal treasure of life and love with God. The first reading isn’t a parable. It’s a true story. It’s a chronicle of heroic perseverance and fidelity, one has been repeated many times in the history of salvation in the lives of the martyrs, whose implicit or occasionally explicit motto was “better to die than to sin.” Jesus would say in the Gospel, “Do not fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul” (Mt 10:28), and the long list of Church martyrs and this valiant family in the Book of Maccabees didn’t fear those who could only hurt and kill the body. What made them capable of saying “yes” to God and “no” to sin in the most dramatic moments was the fact that they were accustomed to saying “yes” to God and “no” to sin in ordinary moments. In their daily lives, they were dying to sin, dying to themselves, and living for God. They lived in a personal relationship with him and they never wanted that communion to end. In the moral decisions they faced, they knew they were choosing, in disguise, either God or the devil, either Christ or Barabbas. Their love for God, their faith in him, and their hope in his promise of eternal life, gave them the strength continually to choose the Lord, to die rather than to sin.
  • In a retreat he preached to Spanish bishops in 2006, the future Pope Francis mentioned this scene of the Mother and Seven Sons and said that the Church as a whole needs to learn from the scene. The Church is a mother, a real mother, and is called to imitate the mother of this family in spurring her children on to fight the good fight, to finish the race and to keep the faith, just like Mary at the Foot of the Cross helped strengthen her Son to cross to the finish line of his saving work. The whole mission of the Church is to become a school of martyrs, to try to nourish our faith to the point that we remain true to God to the point of martyrdom. That’s what the ancient catechumenate always sought to accomplish during the time of ferocious anti-Christian persecutions when those emerging in white robes from the baptismal font would have a target on their back the rest of their days. The Church doesn’t exist to make you spiritual wimps but to fill us with heroic virtue. If she doesn’t do that, she fails. Cardinal Bergoglio reminded the Spanish hierarchy of this story of the heroic mother because he knew that many bishops and priests, instead of forming those entrusted to them to remain faithful in the worst of trials train them by their conflict-aversion and pastoral negligence with regard to certain popular sins to become cowards. Many Catholics side with popular opinion more than the Gospel. They deny Christ and his teaching before others. In this last week we saw the sad story of an Irish bishop publicly apologizing for one of his priest’s tenderly but firmly reiterating the Church’s teachings on sexual issues. The priest wasn’t ashamed of the Gospl, but the bishop sadly was. The whole Church is meant to be like the Mother of the Seven Sons and to form Catholics not only to imitate the courage of the sons but to become mothers who will raise families of sons and daughters to be faithful in the same way.
  • How can we not be moved by the speech of the heroic mother that follows the excerpt in today’s first reading? She had seen the authorities cut out the tongue, scalp and chop off the hands and feet of her first son and then fry him; tear off the skin and hair of the second; cut out the tongue of the third; and torture and maltreat the fourth, fifth and sixth in similar ways. She had only one son left, the youngest. The brutal executioners turned to her — who in the middle eastern culture of the time was about to be totally abandoned because she’d have no husband or son to care for her — and urged her to talk her last son out of martyrdom. She had already, after all, given six sons back to God. Surely that was enough of a sacrifice, one could have thought. But the text tells us that, filled with courage, she spoke to her sons before their martyrdom in the language of their forefathers — the language of faith, the true mother tongue! —  that they understood. “I do not know how you came into existence in my womb,” she said. “It was not I who gave you the breath of life, nor was it I who set in order the elements of which each of you is composed. Therefore, since it is the Creator of the universe who shapes each man’s beginning, as he brings about the origin of everything, he, in his mercy, will give you back both breath and life, because you now disregard yourselves for the sake of his law.” She spoke about the faith in the resurrection that God would give to those remain true till the end, a clear sign that the Jewish people believed in the Resurrection despite the Sadducees’ opposition. When only one son was left, King Antiochus himself gave one last chance to try to “save” one of them. She leaned over to her youngest son and appealed, “Son, have pity on me, who carried you in my womb for nine months, nursed you for three years, brought you up, educated and supported you to your present age. I beg you, child: …  Do not be afraid of this executioner, but be worthy of your brothers and accept death, so that in the time of mercy I may receive you again with them.”  She didn’t beg him to have mercy on her and not leave her an orphaned mamma, but to have mercy on her and to remain faithful to God and to all she taught her children in God’s name. And the seventh son was treated worst of all and after he was dead, the king unsurprisingly had their mother killed as well. This family was able to be courageous until the end not because they ate Middle Eastern Wheaties for breakfast each day or because there was something special in their mother’s breast milk. They were able to remain faithful because they loved God more than they loved themselves and more than they loved each other. They were able to remain faithful because they knew that God was a God of the living and that even if they should be struck down they would not be dead but alive forever in him.
  • We are capable of that same heroism in the faith provided that we respond to God’s graces the way they did and keep the reality of the resurrection before us. As St. Teresa of Calcutta counseled, “Remember that the passion of Christ ends always in the joy of the resurrection of Christ, so when you feel in your own heart the suffering of Christ, remember the resurrection has to come. Never let anything so fill you with sorrow as to make you forget the joy of Christ risen.” That is what made her courageous and what led her as a good spiritual mother to help all her daughters and sons grow in courage. She said, “Suffering will never be completely absent from our lives. So don’t be afraid of suffering. Your suffering is a great means of love, if you make use of it. … Suffering … shared with the passion of Christ is a wonderful gift and a sign of love.”
  • The way we prepare, like the mother and the seven sons, for faithfulness in the supreme hour is by being faithful in little things, like our prayer, our charity, our telling the truth, our keeping our promises and commitments, our remaining true to our loved ones, in short, by keeping our life-giving loving friendship alive with him at all times and seeking to ensure, in response to his help, that it is the defining reality of all we are. It’s by remembering that our homes, convents, rectories and parishes are boot camps in which we’re being prepared, and preparing others, for battle.
  • The greatest way for us to grow in the courage and fidelity we need Jesus has left us in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. He has left us himself. When we truly enter into everything that our reception of Jesus in Holy Communion is meant to do in us, we grasp that we are uniting ourselves in total self-giving love to Jesus, uniting ourselves to his own sacrificie out of faithful love for us and for others. By receiving his risen body given for us and blood poured out for us, we are eating and drinking his courage. He didn’t cave in when civil and religious leaders were interrogating him, when Roman soldiers were scourging and crucifying him, when thieves and passers by were mocking him and challenging him to come down from the Cross. Entering into communion with him and keeping that communion will help us, like the martyrs, to remain faithful no matter what the threats. The Eucharist is the food of martyrs, the sustenance of eternal champions, the nourishment of everlasting life. As we come to receive Jesus today, let us explicitly ask him for the grace to remain faithful to him in little things and big things, in good and bad times, in light and darkness, all the days of our life on earth, so that as a family of family we and other brothers and sisters and sisters and mothers in the Church may enjoy forever an eternal communion with him in the Church triumphant, where we hope to rejoice forever with the mother and seven sons from the first reading, and with the martyrs and all the saints!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

At the point of death he said:
“You accursed fiend, you are depriving us of this present life,
but the King of the world will raise us up to live again forever.
It is for his laws that we are dying.”

After him the third suffered their cruel sport.
He put out his tongue at once when told to do so,
and bravely held out his hands, as he spoke these noble words:
“It was from Heaven that I received these;
for the sake of his laws I disdain them;
from him I hope to receive them again.”
Even the king and his attendants marveled at the young man’s courage,
because he regarded his sufferings as nothing.

After he had died,
they tortured and maltreated the fourth brother in the same way.
When he was near death, he said,
“It is my choice to die at the hands of men
with the hope God gives of being raised up by him;
but for you, there will be no resurrection to life.”

Finally, brothers and sisters, pray for us,
so that the word of the Lord may speed forward and be glorified,
as it did among you,
and that we may be delivered from perverse and wicked people,
for not all have faith.
But the Lord is faithful;
he will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one.
We are confident of you in the Lord that what we instruct you,
you are doing and will continue to do.
May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God
and to the endurance of Christ.

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