Thirty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

In our Gospel reading today, we hear the question that the Sadducees posed to Jesus about what the fate of the woman married to seven different brothers would be when they all saw one another again in the afterlife. The question is more of an ironic joke than an actual question, since the Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife to begin with. They asked this question for the purpose of trying to test and to trap our Lord in his reply. Yet this whole trite effort at entrapment backfired rather spectacularly as our Lord took the opportunity to educate them on just how little they really understood of the nature of heaven, and of those who are its inhabitants.

The question today though, is how much do we really understand about the nature of not only heaven and those who inhabit it, but also of the nature of our relationship that God has with those who are there. We are prone to thinking of them simply as those who have died and are now in heaven with our Lord. Yet, our God is the God of the living, and He sees those with him in heaven as indeed still being very much alive. In the law of Moses our Lord states that he IS the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – not that He was their God – He sees them as being very much alive with Him. This is no different than what He sees for us when we join Him in heaven, we are very much alive. We are still very much part of the body of Christ.

I think that when it comes to heaven, we all have our own vision of what it will be like. Perhaps we think of choirs of angels, or continual harp music (not sure how I feel about that one, I hope they allow guitars as well), or perhaps we see a place where we are surrounded by all our loved ones who have gone before us, or even a continual party of ceaseless rejoicing and merriment. All of these things are nice attempts at defining heaven, but I suspect they all fall tragically short. The one thing that seems to be well defined, is that we will be with God, and with Him in such a way as we have never experienced before. We will share an intimacy with Him that is unparalleled with anything that can be achieved here on earth. To know God in this way, means to know all of Him, and in turn to know all that He created on a level we cannot even conceive of now – to literally be so close to Him who created all that there is nothing that will not be revealed to us. What is more, we will experience love that is so pure and undiluted in nature that there will be nothing within us unfulfilled. For the first time, we will know true and complete contentment and fulfillment. I think that perhaps Saint Paul expressed it best when he said “Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, what God has ready for those who love Him”.

The thing that we can take great comfort in right now, is that the same God who came to us as man, and who was willing to die for each one of us, has also promised us that when we live for Him, we will indeed live forever with Him in heaven. He does not ever lie, He is the God of truth, and has proven His word by His actions. There is literally no one else that we have more reason to accept as both reality, and as authentic in all that He said and did than our God. We may find it hard to wrap our heads around the concept of such a pure and powerful being. This is not surprising given how little we know, and how much we still seek to learn about the fabric of the universe that He created, because if the creation itself is that hard to fathom, how much more so the Creator. Our Lord has a plan for each one of us to learn, and to grow in intimacy with HIm, we simply need to allow His plan to work within us, in the appointed manner and time that He has defined. If we can trust in the things that He has provided to keep our fragile forms alive each day, we can certainly trust in His plan for those He loves so deeply.