Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, November 5, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
November 5, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when he will speak to us about the reality of heaven.
• November, as you know, is the month in which the Church always focuses 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 remember and pray for all the dead, especially those who are in need of our prayers and sacrifices to enter into paradise. And throughout the month, the Church keeps the four last things in front of us. First, the fact that each of us will die, some of us by surprise, much earlier than we think. Second, as soon as we die, we will be judged. Jesus gives us the criteria of that final exam of life, but we need to be ready for it, by a life of Christian faith, hope and love: he’ll separate us on the basis of our deeds, whether we’ve known and loved God and whether we’ve cared for him in our needy neighbors. Some of us will go to heaven, whether directly or through the purification of purgatory, and others will go to a place of definitive self-alienation from God. These are realities that Jesus affirms throughout the Gospel.
• In this Sunday’s Gospel, he speaks about heaven in conversation with a group called the Sadducees, who were members of the high priestly elites and didn’t believe in the Resurrection. They only accepted the Torah, or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers — and thought that there was no reference there at all to resurrection from the dead. To try to test Jesus and prove their point about the absurdity 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 text of Genesis, she had become “one flesh” with seven different men until death did they part, 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 supposed, 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 implies, is a reality for this world. The reason for this is pretty obvious: 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 in the afterlife! While there will be no marriage and conjugal sexual activity in heaven, however, 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. It’s meant to get us ready for the loving intersubjectivity of the communion of the saints within the loving communion of persons who is the Blessed Trinity. It’s meant to prepare us for the wedding feast of the Lamb.
• 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 “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” God didn’t tell Moses that he was their God but is their God. Therefore Abraham, Isaac and Jacob couldn’t be truly dead, because, as Jesus says, the Lord is “God not of the dead but of the living.” Eternal life, therefore, is real.
• What are the practical consequences that we should take from Jesus’ conversation with the Sadducees?
• The first consequence is to stoke our hunger for heaven. Jesus told so many parables of the Kingdom of Heaven in order to whet our appetites for the eternal banquet. When we, at his instruction, dare to pray to our Father in heaven “Thy Kingdom come!,” we’re supposed to be stirring into a flame our desire to be with him and all the saints in his unending kingdom of love.
• The second consequence is that we must develop a personal, truly vital, relationship with God. The God of the universe is not the deity of a cemetery of dead bodies, but rather “the God of the living.” And not just the living “in general”: He is the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” and he’s meant to be the God of Roger, of Grazie, Ashley, Maureen, Leigh, Alyssa and fill in your own name. 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). Jesus 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). Eternal life, in other words, 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 since his life is eternal.
• The third consequence is to take advantage of the means God gives us to enter into that life-giving relationship with him. The sacraments, like marriage, but also baptism, confession, the Holy Eucharist, Confirmation and Anointing of the Sick, are all meant to help us enter in that vital relationship. Jesus comes to abide in us and help us abide in him. If we keep the communion with God who is eternal then 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.
• Jesus is the God of the living. And he wants us to enter into a consequential conversation not of words but of life with him, so that we might experience the eternal joy of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, of Mary and Joseph, of Francis, Dominic and Ignatius, of Teresa, Catherine, and Edith, of all the saints. Let’s take advantage of the graces of this month of November to focus on the reality of heaven and on God’s call for us, like the saints, to choose it in all our daily decisions. God bless you.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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