A Reflection for the Thirty-second Sunday in Odd Time
Readings: 2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3: 5 Luke 20:27-38
Every thing passes save souls, though we’re tempted to think that it’s the other way round. The valiant family within the Book of Maccabees already knows this truth, one which can be fully revealed within the resurrection of the Christ.
At the purpose of death he said:
“You accursed fiend, you’re depriving us of this present life,
however the King of the world will raise us as much as live again without end.
It’s for his laws that we’re dying” (2 Mac 7:9).
Martyrs were the primary saints to be celebrated by the church. The church appropriately sensed that their deaths proclaimed her truth: Every thing passes save souls. The world, and all it holds, could be surrendered since it only exists to call us into relationship. To be an individual is to be oriented toward others, to seek out our achievement in them. Once that’s achieved, the stage, which we call the world, has served its purpose.
This Christian understanding of the cosmos is sort of different from that of lots of our contemporaries. They’ve come to think that the world explains itself. It’s the aim of individuals that they find to be the nice mystery.
Our faith sees it the opposite way around. We see the world as worthy of the wonder we give it, but more wonderful still are the minds that seek to know it and to reply to its creator. St. Thomas Aquinas was not given to overstatement. “The great of grace in a single (soul) is larger than the great of nature in the entire universe” (ST I, II, q. 113).
This Christian understanding of the cosmos is sort of different from that of lots of our contemporaries.
Humanity has never ceased pondering its relationship to the cosmos. An excellent example is Shakespeare’s aptly named play, “The Tempest.” Every thing seems so strong, but then all is stilled—though perhaps not souls themselves.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, just like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the nice globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We’re such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep (4.1.148-158).
It’s true that our spirits, as they exist on this world, do melt into thin air. We breathe our last and we’re gone. But our souls, our word for our deepest selves, continue to exist in Christ.
How will we know this? That is the meaning of the resurrection! Christ stays after death. He retrieves the relationships that were scattered by his execution. He seeks out his friends, not to ascertain his existence but to finish theirs.
For the disciples, the empty tomb had already proven his resurrection. They knew that that they had neither the courage nor the rationale to take his body from the darkness. No, something truly extraordinary had happened.
All that stands other than Christ, all that stands outside a loving relationship with him, passes away without end, into the conscious chaos we call hell.
The aim of Christ’s post-resurrection appearances isn’t to prove his conquer death to his disciples, though he does at the very least that much. But their greater goal is to disclose the world to be itself ephemeral, something lower than the individuals who inhabit it.
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the nice globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
All that stands other than Christ, all that stands outside a loving relationship with him, passes away without end, into the conscious chaos we call hell. “Conscious chaos” because hell is the unique combination of the 2: utter chaos and the unending consciousness that this separation is what we’ve chosen for ourselves.
Christ emerges from death to reclaim the person he was. He reveals himself to the disciples. He doesn’t show them the tip of all things on earth. He doesn’t show them a world yet to return. Or fairly, he shows them each in showing them his person. The world will continue to exist when Christ returns, however the order of existence can be reversed. A tempestuous world, which once tormented us, will burn away. A glorified world yet to return will continue to exist in us.
The people we loved and who we became because we loved, these shall not pass.
When the tempest we call life has stilled, we are going to finally know that without the resurrected Christ
We’re such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The world is a dream from which we are going to awake. Even marriage will pass away because it is going to have achieved its purpose. Love can have fashioned a soul. However the people we loved and who we became because we loved, these shall not pass.
They’ll now not die,
for they’re like angels;
and so they are the youngsters of God
because they’re those who will rise (Lk 20:36).
