The Life to Come
November 11, 2007

Readings for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Reading 1: 2 Mac. 7, 1–2, 9–14

Responsorial Psalm: Ps. 17, 1, 5–6, 8, 15

Reading 2: 2 Thes. 2, 16–3, 5

Gospel: Lk. 20, 27–38

Link to Readings

By Father Thomas Acklin, O.S.B.

We are so busy with our everyday lives that we hardly think about the life to come. Then, when someone we love dies, or we ourselves realize that we are aging or perhaps that we are facing death, we find ourselves up against a wall. All those accounts of the appearances of the risen Lord Jesus and His promise that we will share in His Resurrection, how can this be, and how can we believe this?

It is probably the relative comfort and security of our lives that allow us to put off having a stronger faith in our share in the Resurrection. Maccabees’ sons, whom we hear about in the first reading, were facing martyrdom for their Jewish faith. Many years before the coming of Christ, they already believed in the resurrection. The persecution they suffered, which eventually led to martyrdom, made them even firmer in their faith. The same is true of the early Christians, like St. Paul who exhorts the people of Thessalonica in today’s second reading.

Whose Wife Will that Woman Be?

Other than the appearances of the risen Lord in the Gospels, there are very few places in the New Testament where we get as clear a picture of what our risen life will be like than what we hear in today’s Gospel. We learn from the Gospel that, despite some Jews’ faith in the resurrection, the Sadducees still did not believe. In His response to the Sadducees, Jesus unequivocally pronounces the reality of the resurrection from the dead. At the same time, He strips it of any magical ideas.

Jewish law had called for a man to marry his brother’s widowed wife, and the Sadducees use this law to paint an absurd picture of what it would be like in heaven if a woman has more than one husband. To whom would she be married in heaven? In His reply, Jesus rejects all understandings of life in the world to come that see it simply as a prolongation or extension of this life. In “the age to come” we are “Sons of the Resurrection,” “Sons of God.” We will be “no longer liable to death” because “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. All are alive for him.”

Live in the God of the Living

So the best way for us to face death and to live life most deeply is to not so much worry about ourselves, or even our loved ones, in terms of what is to come beyond death and what it will be like. Rather, we should simply live in Jesus Christ, “the God of the living.” In our baptism, we died with Christ so that we might live with Him. When we go to Confession, we receive not only forgiveness, but the promise that we are sons and daughters of God, God who is the God of the living.

Sin is death, and we begin dying spiritually when we live in sin. When we confess our sins and are nourished by the Body and Blood of Christ, which brings us life, we move from death to life. Pope Benedict XVI said in one of his interventions during the synod on the Eucharist in 2005, that in the Eucharist we receive not only Jesus as He lived and walked on earth, not only Jesus as He gave Himself at the Last Supper and on the Cross, but also Jesus risen and glorified.

Our faith in our share, someday, in the Resurrection of Christ will become more and more real if “we live no longer for ourselves but Him,” as we say in Eucharistic prayer IV. If we live not only for others but for Him and in Him, who is the God of the living, we will know the truth that we will share someday in His Resurrection because we will already somehow experience eternal life as we live our life on earth.

Fr. Thomas Acklin, O.S.B., S.T.D., Ph.D., resides at St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. He presently serves as a professor of theology and psychology at St. Vincent College and St. Vincent Seminary, and is a faculty member of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Institute and Foundation. Fr. Acklin has written a number of articles and recently published two books: The Unchanging Heart of the Priesthood and The Passion of the Lamb.

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