The Church as Mother, Preparing Sons and Daughters Courageously for Eternity, Thirty-Second Sunday (C), November 6, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
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: 

• Most people, no matter what their age, prefer not to think about death, judgment and our eternal destiny. But it’s a particular temptation for young people, who spend far more time thinking about their short-term future on earth than about their long-term future in the new heavens and new earth. That’s why the Church wisely and mercifully has all of us focus on the last things every November as we conclude the liturgical year because throughout the Gospels, Jesus reminds us that we do not know the day or the hour and that we always have to be vigilant so that when Jesus comes for us, he doesn’t surprise us like a thief in the night, but finds us ready with outstretched arms. Today’s readings help us to focus on heaven and on the path and virtues that will lead us there, hoping that we will live each day with wisdom in mind.
• In the Gospel, Jesus speaks about heaven in conversation with a group called the Sadducees, who were members of the high priestly caste. The Sadducees accepted only the first five books of the Hebrew Bible — what are called the Torah in Hebrew or Pentateuch in Greek — and didn’t believe in the resurrection of the body because they erroneously thought that there no reference to it in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers. To try to test Jesus and prove their point about the supposed impossibility of the resurrection of the body, they brought to Jesus the invented example of a woman who married successively seven different brothers after each previous brother had died. If according to the language of Genesis, she had become “one flesh” with seven different men until death they parted, they asked, then with whom would she be one flesh in the resurrection, if there were a resurrection? Since it is ridiculous to think that she would be united in one flesh to seven simultaneously, they concluded, there couldn’t be a resurrection.
• Jesus’ answer highlighted two essential things about heaven. First, he said that it’s only the children of this age who marry and remarry. In heaven, he states, there will be no marrying or giving in marriage because there will only be one wedding, the wedding feast of the Lamb and his Bride the Church. The institution and sacrament of marriage, Jesus indicates, is a reality for this world. 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.
• The second thing Jesus’ answer highlights is that, contrary to Sadducees’ supposition, the Torah or Pentateuch does speak about heaven. Jesus says that when God revealed himself to Moses from the burning bush, he identified himself as the great “I am” (literally Yahweh) and as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” God didn’t tell Moses that he was the God of the patriarchs but is their God. Therefore Abraham, Isaac and Jacob couldn’t be truly dead, since, as Jesus says, the Lord is “God not of the dead but of the living.” Eternal life, therefore, is real. That points to the trut that eternal life flows from a personal, truly vital, bond with God. 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 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. 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, Joel, Zach, Maddie, Kelly and Clare.” When we begin to live this deep sense of belonging, this profound friendship with the “God of the living,” through prayer, the sacraments, charity, work and study, then we are already experiencing in embryonic form eternal life! And death will be nothing other than a change of address to a place far more beautiful than any earthly mansion, not made by man, eternal in heaven.
• These lessons Jesus teaches about the reality of heaven, the purpose of human life, and the way by which we enter even now into life to the full, is meant to change profoundly the way we live. There are still many who deny the possibility of heaven, like Marx and all his materialist followers who claim that the afterlife is just a narcotic dream that leads us to escape from this world and its responsibilities. There are others who look at heaven with human imagination and sentimentality, as an extension of the good things of this world, in which we’ll be at a beach, with our favorite drinks, pets and people, board games, with soft wings on our back as we dance on clouds listening to John Lennon’s Imagine. Please. Jesus helps us to see it’s fundamentally about a love far greater than any experienced here, something that is meant to orient and give us courage to live our faith to the full.
• The other readings are chosen to show the type of impact faith in the fact of the resurrection and trust and love of God who is the “Resurrection and the Life” are supposed to have in our life. In today’s second reading, St. Paul prays for the Christians in Thessalonika, that God who has given us “everlasting encouragement” will “guard [them] from the evil one” and “direct [their] hearts to the love of God and to the endurance of Christ.” God wants to give us a courage that never wane or expire, to protect us from the evil one in this world and forever, and to direct our hearts to endure like Christ to the end. In human life, many times we will be tested, just like St. Paul’s was tested, but God wants to strengthen us to 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, 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 nearly 200 years before Easter Sunday, 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 but a true story. It’s a chronicle of heroic perseverance and fidelity, one has been repeated many times in the lives of the martyrs, whose implicit or occasionally explicit motto was “better to die than to sin.” Jesus would say elsewhere 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 flesh. 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 life, they were dying to sin, dying to themselves, and living for God. They treasured a personal relationship with him and they never wanted that communion to end. In the moral decisions they faced, they refused to betray him, because they knew they were choosing, in disguise, either God or the devil, or later, 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 it. 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 saints and martyrs, to try to nourish our faith to the point that we remain true to God to the end, to death, even to 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 contract on their heads for the rest of their days. The Church doesn’t exist to make 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, actually train them by their conflict-aversion and pastoral negligence to become cowards. Many Catholics side with popular opinion more than the Gospel, but their pastors pander them rather than help them know the truth. 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 Gospel, 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. That’s one of my most important missions as your chaplain here at Columbia, to form you to be strong in faith here on campus, and for the rest of our life.
• 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 her 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 see the same heroism in the members of the early Church when they stood before the same Sanhedrin that crucified Jesus. When the Sanhedrin were threatening Peter and John and the others with death, they were unintimidated because they knew that even should they be killed for Jesus, God the Father who raised Jesus on the third day would raise them too. The resurrection made them unafraid of death. And if someone can’t be intimidated by the threat of suffering and execution, then the person will be courageous in all aspects of life. Jesus’ resurrection, the promise of eternal, our relationship with him, is meant to make us that bold.
• 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 sacrifice out of faithful love for us and the world. 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 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 the 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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