Just a word...Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time...November 6, 2022

I don’t know about you, but the line in our Gospel today that always grabs me is “Finally, the woman also died.”  No surprise there!  She had been passed from dead brother to next in line brother until she had had 7 marriages.  She must have been exhausted!  Of course, the argument offered by the Sadducees to trick Jesus was hypothetical, but his answer was of great interest to them.  They did not believe in life after death and so were concerned with only the material...property, that is, meaning the wife and the inheritance. Their question was as ridiculous as arguing about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. In their view, the meaning of life was determined by the concrete conditions of one’s life, absent any eternal significance. Contrast this stance with that of the poor brothers who were tortured for their faith in our first reading; their reliance on God’s promise of resurrection conferred meaning on their suffering.

Our parish has suffered an inordinate number of deaths this year. Our ability to make sense of death depends in no small part, upon our image of God.  Do we see God as throwing lightning bolts at us, of sickness, accident or what have you, as punishment for some past transgression, or do we possess the imagination to recognize that so much of life is beyond our understanding?  Can we enlarge our capacity to embrace the mysteries that exist around us, mysteries that cannot be explained away by physics or by any linear mode of thinking?  Can we amend our concept of legacy beyond the number of children we have or the size of our estate, to adopt a more open stance of accepting the promises of our God, that God is love, and created us in the divine image, for love?  God has promised to be with us always, in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. And God’s promises include that of resurrection.

Dwelling in the realm of the concrete, of certainty about life, can be comfortable, until something goes wrong, something we cannot understand.  Uncertainty and ambiguity may be uncomfortable, but they hold within them the possibility of inviting us to see differently, of enlarging our perception of what is truly real.

I know in my life there have been occurrences that cannot be rationally explained away.  I imagine that’s also true for many of you. We recite in our Creed that we believe that God made all things, visible and invisible.  Perhaps as we struggle to find meaning in the deaths we are experiencing, it might be helpful to consider the line from the book, The Little Prince, “It is only with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”