(Photo of St. Mary Church, Yazoo City, MS.
Photo taken by Mark Leffler, parishioner of
St. Richard parish, Jackson, MS)
The people of Ancient Israel had questions about what life after death would be like, just as many in our modern world struggle with the significance of both life & death as we live out our earthly existence. Our 1st reading from the 2nd book of Maccabees takes us almost 2 centuries before Christ, when the Jews in ancient Israel were struggling to live out their faith against a occupying Greek government that forbid their Jewish religious practices. A woman & her 7 sons who were arrested by the Greek king; they were subjected to cruel torture in an attempt to get them to eat pork in violation of the laws given to them by God. One by one the sons are put to death with their mother as a witness, but they stand firm, willing to die for the faith of their ancestors. We might not understand how being forced to eat pork would be grounds for giving up our lives, but to this family, eating pork was an act of betraying God. The sons gave up their lives with hope in the resurrection, that the Lord would raise them up after death.
Throughout history, many men & women have given up their lives for the faith, willing to be enduring witnesses to the values & teachings of Jesus. Just a couple of weeks ago, we celebrated the memorial of Jean de Brebeuf & Isaac Jogues, two Jesuit priests from France who were among the first to bring the Gospel to North America in the 17th century in present-day Quebec & New York state. Both men suffered great violence in their ministry to the Mohawk & Huron tribes. Isaac Jogues even had to get special dispensation from the pope in order to continue to say mass, since he lost many fingers from the torture he endured, & under the old rules of canon law, a priest had to be able to pick up the host with his thumb & forefinger. Eventually, both died very violent, painful deaths for the faith. Yet, they came to America with a heart for the missions, knowing the dangers that were present. Even though Jean de Brebeuf & Isaac Joques lived many centuries ago, their witness of faith still speaks so strongly today across time & space; their belief in the resurrection & the new life they have in Christ allowed them to have no fear of death, just like the woman & her sons from Maccabees.
Our belief in the resurrection & the new life we receive in Christ should be the source & summit of our lives. But, like the convoluted situation that the Sadducees posed to Jesus in their questions, perhaps we also have difficulty in fully understanding the connection between the resurrected life that we have after death & the reality of resurrection of Jesus that already brings us new life here on earth. We often see people living in two extremes here on earth. Some in our society seem to think that earthly pleasure is all that matters, that we don’t need faith in God, & can instead live by our own man-made laws & our own man-made code of morality. On the other extreme, some are zealous in the way they live our their religious faith, trying to obey the letter of the law to the smallest detail, but violating the spirit of God’s love & mercy & finding very little joy in the way they live out their faith. When we don’t see the continuity between our lives here on earth & the eternal life that is to come, then we can easily fall into one of these two extremes in our lives. God calls us to see our earthly lives & our lives after our earthly death as one continuous journey in the light of our faith. The values of the kingdom of God in which we live now will guide us & mold us toward our eternal destiny.
St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Thessalonians that our Lord Jesus Christ & God the Father give us encouragement in the graces we receive in our journey of faith, that our hearts are strengthened by every good deed & good word we undertake for the faith. Paul prayed that we like the Thessalonians be delivered from the perversity & wickedness that can entrap us, that we instead must trust in the way we are instructed in order to live true lives of faith. If the decisions we make in this life are uncaring, unloving, self-centered & superficial, if the way we live turns our hearts away from God, then we are not preparing ourselves in the eternal ways of God’s kingdom.
Paul tells us that God is the God of the living, not of the dead. We can better understand this statement by realizing how our faith shapes us – we become what we believe & what we practice here on earth, & we become what we believe when we enter eternal life in Christ. In our lives of faith here on earth, we are called to live in hope, in trust, & in love. Our faith helps us to let go of our fears, our sins, & our faults. In life & in death, we give ourselves over to God’s love & mercy.
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