A woman had seven
husbands, who all died. Whose wife will
she be when she dies? I don’t know! Sometimes you come to Church and the
priests give you hell. Today’s readings encourage the priest to give you heaven[1].
Let’s start with
the first reading. The first reading certainly appears to be quite negative. It
is the grueling account of the torture of seven brothers from the Second Book
of Maccabees[2].
There is something very positive in the grisly account we just heard, though.
As the brothers were dying, each proclaimed that they trusted in God to raise
them up to heaven. Heaven is a reality that Jesus also speaks about in today’s
Gospel when he is confronted by the Sadducees who refuse to accept the possibility
of life after death. Jesus, siding with the Pharisees in this case who believed
in the resurrection of the dead, dismissed the Sadducees’ arguments about whose wife would that woman
with seven dead husbands be after she died.
Basically he told them that their question was rather infantile. He said
that the reality of life after death is beyond human comprehension. They are like angels and are children of God.
Many of us view
heaven as though it were earth done right. This is due to our staying on the
concrete level of thinking of the little child, where everything needs to be
seen and experienced. So we picture our loved ones on a golf course where every
drive is up the fairway and every putt goes in. They are playing tennis and
every stroke is perfect. We consider
those who have gone before us, and are looking forward to once more having a
good laugh with dear old Dad. But the spiritual is so much more, infinitely more,
than our minds can grasp! We do not know what it is like to be “like the
angels,” because we cannot comprehend angelic life, but we do know that it will
be better than our fondest imagination.
In the third
book of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Paradisio,
Dante ascends through the ten spheres of heaven. He comes upon various souls
who inhabit each sphere. The inhabitants are able to tolerate deeper and deeper
amounts of God’s love than those of the sphere below them. This is all still envisioning heaven in very
concrete terms, but then Dante changes the level of thinking. He is led by St. Bernard to Mary, Queen of
Heaven. St. Bernard asks her to pray to God that Dante may look upon Him. She
does, and Dante looks into the Eternal Light.
He sees the image of the Holy Trinity and ponders the mysteries of God. All
of a sudden there is a brilliant flash of light as God bestows all the answers
to all questions upon Dante. At that point Dante’s soul is at one with God[3].
Now, this is
merely Dante’s explanation of heaven. I see its value in the way it ends. Dante
is no longer bound by physical concepts but is totally united to God. There are
times in our lives when we feel a deep peace. These are the times that we are
one with God. Imagine if that union, that peace, were total and eternal.
We were created
to know, love and serve God in this life and to be happy with Him forever in
the next[4]. Terminology
may change through the years, but the basic truths remain the same. Heaven is
that place, that state of being, where we are happily united with God forever[5].
The Almighty
Creator of the universe loves us so much that he sent his son to become one of
us and die for us. Now when we love someone, we want to give him or her
everything we can to express our love. God gave us His Son in this life. What
must he have in store for us in the next life?
The answer to that question can merely be summarized in the term,
heaven.
We are only on
this world for a brief time. We have to make the most of the period of our
lives that is both physical and spiritual. We do this by leading the physical
to the spiritual. That is why we are
called to nurture the Presence of Christ within ourselves. That is why we are
called to make Christ present to others. We only have one life. We pray today for the courage to allow God to
perfect this life.
May we always be
united to Him, here and hereafter ■
[1] Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary
Time, cycle C, November 10, 2013. Readings: 2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14;
Responsorial Psalm 17:1, 5-6, 8, 15; 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5; Luke 20:27-38
[2] This took place about 160 years
before Jesus when the Syrians attempted to eliminate the Jewish religion. Just as 300 years later Christians would be
told to curse Jesus or die, the Jews were told to perform an action in direct
opposition to the Law of Moses or die.
[3] The Divine Comedy (Italian: Divina Commedia) is an epic poem written
by Dante Alighieri between c. 1308 and his death in 1321. It is widely
considered the preeminent work of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the
greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative and allegorical
vision of the afterlife is a culmination of the medieval world-view as it had
developed in the Western Church. It helped establish the Tuscan dialect, in
which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into
three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and
Paradiso.
[4] Baltimore catechism!
[5] The Catechism of the Catholic
Church, released in 1992, in commenting on Our Father Who art in heaven says
that heaven, the Father's house, is the true homeland toward which we are
heading and to which, already, we belong.” (CCC 2802).
Ilustration: Divine Comédie, Rencontre de Dante et de Béatrice; XIVe siècle. École
vénitienne. Enluminure. Libreria Marciana,
Venise. Dante suit Béatrice pour contempler les étoiles immobiles, merveilles
de la création, dans la profondeur de l’amour divin.
