Preparing for Death and Entering into Life with Jesus through Mary, 33rd Saturday (I), November 23, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Villa Guadalupe Retreat House, Stamford, CT
Retreat For Women
“Woman, Great Is Your Faith: Models of Faith for Women at a Time of Crisis”
Votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Gate of Heaven
November 23, 2019
1 Mc 6:1-13, Ps 9, Lk 20:27-40

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• On a retreat, when we have the time to examine more deeply the meaning of our life and its direction, one of the traditional meditations is dedicated to the four last things, what the Church ponders throughout the month of November: the reality of death and the judgment that will follow, and the definitive state to which that judgment will direct us, either eternal loving communion with God in heaven or definitive self-alienation in Hell. In the classic of Christian spirituality, The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis urges us to make this meditation each day.“In every deed and every thought, act as though you were to die this very day. … When it is morning reflect that you may not see the evening, and in the evening dare not boast that you will see the morrow. Always be prepared, and so live that death may never find you unprepared. Many die suddenly and unexpectedly. For at such an hour you do not realize, the Son of Man will come. … Strive now to live in such a way that in the hour of death you may rather rejoice than fear. Learn now to die to the world, so you will begin to live with Christ. Learn now to spurn all earthly things, so that you may then freely go to Christ. … Lay up for yourself riches that will last while you still have time. Think of nothing but your salvation; care only for the things of God. Make yourself friends, by venerating the saints of God and walking in their steps. Keep yourself a stranger and a pilgrim upon the earth. … Keep your heart free, and lifted up towards God, for here have we no lasting city.” Kempis’ spiritual wisdom, which has formed many saints over the last six centuries, is based on the insight that it is only when we realize that today may be our last day, and we may not have the opportunity to punt the truly important things until tomorrow, that we begin to think clearly and get our priorities straight. We act differently toward people when we realize that today could be our last interaction with them. We begin to look at time differently and no longer wish to waste it on the various diversions with which we fill our lives. We’re not tempted in the same way toward the harsh word, or the evil thought, or the vengeful action, knowing that that might be the last thing we ever do. We begin to have a far deeper appreciation for prayer and the sacraments and the Church, especially the Eucharist. We cease to sleepwalk spiritually and become fully alert to the meaning of every moment, thought, word and deed.
• Today’s readings help us to focus on the last things. In the reading from the Book of Maccabees, we see the dread of King Antiochus as he was preparing for death. He had sought in life not to follow God but to pretend as if he were god, giving the command to murder the inhabitants of Judah, to desecrate the Temple, to carry away the sacred vessels and to lead the people into idolatry. Now he was going the way of all flesh and was “struck with fear and very much shaken, sick with grief, … [and] overwhelmed with sorrow.” He didn’t grasp that unlike him in life, the true God is merciful, and so Antiochus was full of remorse but not repentance, anticipating that God was merely punishing him for his maleficence. What a terrible way to die! What a terrible way to have lived! No one wants to end up like Antiochus at the end of life. Christ offers us a different way. We see that way in the Gospel.
• The Sadducees approach Jesus with a question designed to test him and prove their point that there is no resurrection of the dead, no heaven, no relationship with God that surpasses this world. The Sadducees were the priestly aristocracy and they only accepted the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, which they claimed gave no evidence whatsoever of the resurrection. They were often in dispute with the Scribes and the Pharisees, who accepted the entire Hebrew Bible, which gives ample prophecy of the resurrection. We see evidence of this dispute in the detail that after Jesus’ response, the Scribes said, “Teacher, you have answered well,” since the Scribes were regularly arguing with the Sadducees about this very point. The Sadducees pose a question to Jesus based on the truth of marriage and one aspect of the Mosaic law. We know that in the beginning, God said that when a man leaves his mother and father and clings to his wife, they become one flesh, and no one can render their bond asunder (Gen 2:24). The Jews also practiced what is called the levirate law of marriage. Moses taught in the Book of Deuteronomy, “When brothers live together and one of them dies without a son, the widow of the deceased shall not marry anyone outside the family; but her husband’s brother shall go to her and perform the duty of a brother-in-law by marrying her. The first-born son she bears shall continue the line of the deceased brother, that his name may not be blotted out from Israel” (Deut 25:5-6). The first son born from the woman would technically become the heir of the deceased brother in order to carry on his name through successive generations of progeny. The Sadducees’ question about the seven brothers who married the same seemingly sterile woman was essentially this: if this woman became one flesh with seven different men, to which of the seven will she be united in one flesh forever? The implication was that since she couldn’t be one flesh with all seven, there could be no eternal life, because it would make the one-flesh bond of marriage absurd.
• Jesus responds by pointing our two essential realities about the relationship between this life and the next.
• The first is about the connection between marriage and the afterlife. He describes how marriage is essentially an institution God founded for this world meant to help people enter into a far greater marriage bond, what will later be revealed as the marriage of the Lamb with his Bride the Church that will be consummated forever in the wedding feast of heaven. “The children of this age marry and remarry,” Jesus says, “but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.” There are no more marriages taking place in the heavenly Jerusalem. The reason for this is because marriage, as God intended, is a sacrament. It’s meant to be a bridge to eternity, a sign and means of intimate communion with God and his life that knows no end. There’s a two-fold purpose to the Sacrament of Marriage, what has traditionally been called “the mutual sanctification of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring,” and both aspects of that purpose will have already been fulfilled in heaven: there’s no need for the sanctification of spouses because, hopefully, both spouses will be saints around God’s throne; and there will be no new offspring in heaven, there will be no need for maternity wards and schools because there will be no births and everyone will be full stature in Christ. Marriage is meant to prepare people for this entrance into Christ’s eternal marriage with us. To say that there is no marriage or giving in marriage in heaven doesn’t mean, of course, that there will be no love in heaven — there certainly will! — and it doesn’t mean that those who were spouses here on earth won’t have an even deeper spiritual bond in Christ than they even anticipated here on earth, but that the essential properties of marital love between one man and one woman — its priority, one-flesh physicality, and exclusively — will no longer be in vigor. Those who are married are called to ponder deeply the fundamental purpose of the Sacrament of Marriage, which is meant to be a school of sanctification leading each other and children, God-willing, to the unending nuptial of the Lamb and the Bride.
• The second thing Jesus reveals is about eternal life itself. In St. Matthew’s version of the account, Jesus tells the Sadducees, “You are misled because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God” (Mt 22:29). They don’t understand even the five books of Sacred Scripture they accept, he says, nor what God’s power is to raise the dead. He cites an example from the Pentateuch that up until this time had never been used to refute the Sadducees’ objection. “That the dead will rise,” Jesus indicates, “even Moses made known in the passage about the bush, when he called ‘Lord’ the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; and he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.” This is a reference to the famous scene in the second book of the Hebrew Bible, Exodus, wherein God appeared to Moses in the form of a burning bush and revealed himself as YHWH (“I am who am”) and as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Ex 3:1-15). The fact that God said, “I am,” rather than “I was,” the God of their forefathers is a powerful indication that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are in fact alive. Not only did Jesus’ response win the acclaim of the Scribes but was so convincing that St. Luke tells us that the Sadducees “no longer dared to ask him anything.”
• But Jesus’ response does far more than win an argument or indicate the meaning of Scripture and the power of God. It also shows us something really important as to how to live so as to live forever. Eternal life is a relationship. God is God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob. God is the God of Clement, Columban and Miguel Pro, whom the Church celebrates today. He is meant likewise to be God of Roger, Luann, Nona, Ruby, Therese, Mary, Leni, Julie, Cecilia, Sarah, Sandy, Rachel, Mary, Tess, Alexandra, Kathryn, Sarah, Lauren, Suzanne, Cindy, Peggy, Angie, Sara, Chris, Holly, Teresa, Hillary, Mary, Jeanne, Patricia, Lisa, Elizabeth, Michelle, and Anne. When Jesus spoke to Martha before raising Lazarus, he revealed that the resurrection wasn’t so much a fact as a living, loving bond: “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” he said, “Whoever lives and believes in me, even though he dies, will live, and no one who lives and believes in me will ever die.” When we live in Jesus, we share an eternal bond, one that even the illness and death of the body can’t rend asunder. That’s why it’s essential for us, if we wish to live forever, that we fully live that bond, fully identify with Jesus as our King, Savior, Lord, Redeemer, Shepherd, Way, Truth, Resurrection and Life.
• How do we do that? It must be more than simply wishful thinking. We must make it practical. The best way I’ve seen was given to us by the former Archbishop of Philadelphia, Cardinal Justin Rigali, two days before he retired in 2011. He wrote for the priests of his Archdiocese an extraordinarily beautiful meditation on Christian life in view of eternity. “Preparing for death is the greatest opportunity in our lives,” Cardinal Rigali wrote somewhat provocatively. Rather than dreading death as the inexorable occasion in which our life will be taken from us, we can learn from Jesus how to make our death an act of supreme self-giving love. Sometimes we view the crucifixion as if Jesus suffered it passively, exclusively as a victim. Jesus, however, in foretelling his death, clarified that he was approaching it with full freedom, love and courage. “I am the Good Shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,” Jesus stressed. “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down” (Jn 10:11, 18). Likewise, all of us have been given by Jesus’ death and resurrection a similar power. “We have the possibility to rehearse our death,” Cardinal Rigali wrote, “not in its minute details—although saints have found this useful—but in the sense of accepting it in anticipation by an act of our will that will be consummated freely at the moment of our death and offered to the Father in union with the death of Jesus. We can indeed accept and anticipate by an act of our will the laying down of our life in union with Jesus!” The rehearsing of our death in Christ each day is not meant to be a morbid exercise, but a life-giving daily encounter with the Father in which we entrusted ourselves to him through, with and in Christ. “The Father wills that we pass through death with His Son in order to live, not in order to die.” Cardinal Rigali declared. “Seen in this perspective, death is the moment to give all, to surrender all with Jesus and in union with His sacrifice. All of this can be anticipated by an act of our will, by an act of our love. When anticipated by an act of loving acceptance, death is an opportunity to say ‘yes’ to the Father, just as Jesus did; to say ‘yes’ with all our heart, as Jesus did.” Because the anticipation day-after day in self-offering to God become a person’s fundamental “yes” to God, it is a daily moment of conversion and “a magnificent opportunity to be able to make up for every lack of love in our lives, for every lack of obedience, for every lack of saying ‘yes,’ for every sin that we have ever committed.” Presenting ourselves to the Lord each day in this anticipated death — which can be done both at our early morning offering of the whole day to God conscious that it may be our last day, or at night at our examination of conscience when we make our own Jesus’ words, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46)— is the means by which we learn to say “yes” and offer ourselves in love to God throughout the day. And this self-surrender will bring, the Cardinal assured us, doubtless from personal experience, not sadness but “joy and peace and love in obedience.” He says that this daily dying and rising with Christ is the best way to be freed of the fear of a sudden death, even if it should come today. “When the hour of death comes,” he noted, “we may not be conscious. It may come very suddenly, by reason of an accident, by reason of a heart attack; there are a million and one possibilities left to our imagination but this does not matter. The point is: the surrender will have been made thousands of times! The Father will understand that each of us had the power, which we exercised, the power, with His Son Jesus, to lay down our life freely, lovingly and definitively. Then there will be no obstacle to the consummation of our love. Life and holiness will be ours forever in the communion of the Most Blessed Trinity.” Death will therefore become the final renewal of our baptismal promises and the fulfillment of our self-offering with Christ to the Father in the Holy Eucharist. And the Father will be able to view our death as the “re-enactment” of the death of his Son and apply to us the “full salvific power of the cross and resurrection.” Since preparing for death is the greatest opportunity in our lives, Cardinal Rigali stressed, “Now is the time to give all!” Now, this November, this retreat, is the time to form in ourselves this habit of daily self-offering, to learn how each day not to let our life be taken from us but freely give it in love, entrusting ourselves to the outstretched hands of the Father, pronouncing the definitive “yes” to God that we want to say at the moment of our death and for all eternity.
• The one who shows us best and most beautifully how to live this way, in full-time belonging to God, who gave herself fully to God through the fiat of her life, who trusted in what Scripture revealed of eternity and of God’s power to raise from the dead, was Mary. She was the woman great in faith who on Calvary knew that Jesus’ brutal death was not the end but the opening of the Gate of Heaven, who was able to pronounce a Magnificat even there. She was the woman great in faith who was able to see that her Son hammered to a tree and then placed limp in her arms, was still the Resurrection and Life. She was the woman great in faith who faithfully accompanied him into that new and eternal Passover, eventually fully joined him at her Assumption, and now seeks to accompany us to that place where we will meet Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all the saints who live eternally in loving relationship with the Lord of life. We turn to her and ask that she will pray for us now and at the hour of our death and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of her womb whom at this Mass we have the awesome privilege to receive.

The readings for today’s Mass were: