Dom Brian Gerard Kelly, Sunday 32 C

Sons and Daughters of the Resurrection.
As we approach the end of the Liturgical Year, our mass readings become more focussed on the end times and the afterlife, on the Jerusalem that is above. We live as Sons and Daughters of God in hope of
the resurrection. Our goal is ultimately to attain to eternal life in Heaven, but this is not automatic. We ought to be aware daily of this end, of death and judgement, as we live in good hope and not in forgetfulness. We pray at each mass for the repose of the souls or our departed loved ones, especially now during this month of November. And hopefully too there will be people who will pray for the repose of our own souls after our death!
The Sadducees were a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus, opposed to the Pharisees. St Luke tells us in the Acts of the Apostles that they claimed there was “no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit” but that the Pharisees acknowledge all these. A group of Sadducees came to test Jesus on this point. If there is a resurrection from the dead, what will happen in the case where a woman has had more than one husband, owing to the deaths of previous husbands? To understand the full implication of Jesus’
reply, we ought first to bear in mind the purpose of marriage. There are two ends to the sexual act in marriage: these are procreation and bonding between husband and wife, in the marriage covenant. This covenant of marriage is a sacred family bond, between husband and wife and between parents and children. Even in the case where a husband and wife have no children, the bonding still takes place between them. This is why sexual acts outside of marriage, directed only to pleasure, are a distortion of the marriage covenant and gravely sinful. They are not fundamentally ordered to unity because they are outside the marriage vows. The couple have given no consent to a permanent relationship, a relationship to last until death.
But in the resurrection, people no longer die and so there is no goal for procreation. Thus the first end in marriage is absent. Next, Jesus explains that those who are considered worthy to the resurrection from
the dead are “equal to angels”. By this he does not mean that we become pure spirit as the angels are, because we will also have bodies as well as souls. Our nature will remain different to the angels. But we will be like them in the sense of our bond of union with God, with the Holy Trinity. Thus the second goal for marriage – that of bonding through the sexual act – is also absent in Heaven. Therefore souls in Heaven do not marry. They have been transformed more completely into the image and likeness
of God, even surpassing that image in which our first parents were created. Being in the likeness of God these souls will especially be in the image of God in the absolute unity of the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity. The Love souls have in Heaven is a knowing intimacy which infinitely surpasses any intimacy one can share in this life in marriage.
These souls are permeated through and through, as the angels are, with Divine Love. And this work of bringing us to this goal of the resurrection is the work of the Holy Spirit. We must be able to say with St Paul: “In Him we live and move and have our being”, even in our earthly lives. The witness of the marriage bond – although not shared in by resurrected bodies – is a pointer to the everlasting bond experienced in Heaven. The Scriptures use this imagery – especially the Prophet Isaiah – to portray an image of the everlasting covenant bond between God and His people only fulfilled completely in Heaven: Only there, in the Jerusalem that is above, will the prophecy of Isaiah be ultimately completed: “For as a young man
marries a virgin, so shall your sons marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.” We can say – and I hope this is not taken out of context – we will be married to God and to one another! That is our end goal, our expectation for Heaven. We can say that the beginning of this everlasting union occurred with Mary. When we pray in the Hail Mary “The Lord is with you”, be
mindful that the text means much more than simply something like “the Lord is always by your side”. Rather, and in the light of her Immaculate Conception that we now know as a dogma, the text means something much deeper, a much deeper mystery: “The Lord is totally in communion with you”. She is full of Divine Grace. And when she became the Spouse of the Holy Spirit, as only her Immaculate soul could, this marriage bond is more completely the image of what the union of souls in Heaven is. Her virginity could only be perpetual because of this and her assumption into Heaven could only be without death. She had already begun her Heavenly union in her earthly life. Furthermore, her Immaculate Conception opened the way to the great mystery of the Incarnation: God marries us through His Son taking human flesh and becoming truly a man. And because of this truly Divine union, Jesus gives us the command to love one another: what you did to the least of my brethren, you did also to me. And to St Paul: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting”! Mother Teresa sometimes took a person’s hand and squeezing each of their five fingers one after the other would say very emphatically: “you-did-it-to- me”. She became a great saint by living out that Gospel passage at the end of St Matthew’s Gospel to the letter. This is love as a knowing intimacy which prefigures the infinite love in Heaven. We are sons and daughters of God. May we be considered worthy to become sons and daughters of the Resurrection.