Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Thirty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil

November 5, 2022

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.5.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when he will speak to us about the reality of heaven.

* November, as you know, is the month in which the Church always focuses on the four last things — death, judgment, heaven and hell. At the beginning of the month, we celebrate All Saints’ Day, in which we remember and ask the intercession of all those who have arrived at the place to which we aspire. The next day we mark All Souls’ Day, and remember and pray for all the dead, especially those who are in need of our prayers and sacrifices to enter into paradise. And throughout the month, the Church keeps the four last things in front of us. First, the fact that each of us will die, some of us by surprise, much earlier than we think. Second, as soon as we die, we will be judged. Jesus gives us the criteria of that final exam of life, but we need to be ready for it, by a life of Christian faith, hope and love: he’ll separate us on the basis of our deeds, whether we’ve known and loved God and whether we’ve cared for him in our needy neighbors. Some of us will go to heaven, whether directly or through the purification of purgatory, and others will go to a place of definitive self-alienation from God. These are realities that Jesus affirms throughout the Gospel.

* In this Sunday’s Gospel, he speaks about heaven in conversation with a group called the Sadducees, who were members of the high priestly elites and didn’t believe in the Resurrection. They only accepted the Torah, or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers — and thought that there was no reference there at all to resurrection from the dead. To try to test Jesus and prove their point about the absurdity of the resurrection of the body, they brought to Jesus the invented example of a woman who married successively seven different brothers after each previous brother had died. If according to the text of Genesis, she had become “one flesh” with seven different men until death did they part, they asked, then with whom would she be one flesh in the resurrection, if there were a resurrection? Since it is ridiculous to think that she would be united in one flesh to seven simultaneously, they supposed, there couldn’t be a resurrection.

* Jesus’ answer highlighted two essential things about heaven.

* First, he said that it’s only the children of this age who marry and remarry. In heaven, he states, there will be no marrying or giving in marriage because there will only be one wedding, the wedding feast of the Lamb and his Bride the Church. The institution and sacrament of marriage, Jesus implies, is a reality for this world. The reason for this is pretty obvious: Marriage has a two-fold purpose, love and life, or, in more traditional terminology, the mutual sanctification of the spouses and the procreation and education of children. In heaven, there’s no purpose to marriage because men and women no longer need to be sanctified since they’re already saints; and there will be no new children because saints aren’t having babies in the afterlife! While there will be no marriage and conjugal sexual activity in heaven, however, there will certainly be love!