Our Greatest Act Of
Freedom
November 2, 2016 Commemoration of all the Faithful Departed (All Souls Day)
Readings: Wisdom 3:1-9; Romans 5:5-11 or 6:3-9; John 6:37-40,
or any readings from the Lectionary for Ritual Masses, vol. IV, the Masses for the Dead.
Today
we “commemorate” all who have died. We remember them, not just as friends and
family we have known and loved — and still know and love — but with focus,
centering our attention on the meaning and value of death itself. On the
mystery contained in it.
Death
is not just a natural human event. It is the moment of transition from human
and from divine life lived under the conditions and limitations of life on this
earth, to divine life lived in its fullness in union with God, and human life
lived in separation from the body, awaiting resurrection. There is a lot more
to death than just the physical and medical alterations bystanders observe. We
experience a certain awe and wonder as we stand before death. And we should.
Death is a mystery. Something human that involves the divine. A truth inviting
exploration through reason enlightened by faith
In my own
flesh
The
first reading gives us an assurance from faith where reason might stand in
doubt. Job 19: 23-27 is the declaration that through death we do not lose
our individual existence or identity:
But as for me, I know that my Vindicator
lives... whom I myself shall see. My own eyes, not another’s, shall behold him,
and from my flesh I shall see God.
Powerful.
And needed against the fear that at death we might somehow be indistinguishably
“absorbed into God” like a spark lost in the divine fire. Job tells me I will
see God “in my flesh,” my own flesh. My own eyes, “not another’s” will behold
him.
Philosophers tell us the body is the
“principle of individuation.” For example, “human nature” is a general concept,
the same in all people, until it becomes individual in a physical body. That is
why the resurrection of the body is so important. The promise that I will rise
in my body is a special guarantee that I will be my unique, individual self.
This
clarifies, but does not contradict, the greater mystery of the “end time,” the
mystery “hidden for ages in God who created all things,” the mystery Paul was
sent and empowered by grace to make known: God’s “plan for the fullness of
time” was to “gather up all things in Christ.”
Christ
is the “Alpha and the Omega, the beginning, the middle and the end of the
mystery of God’s plan for creation. In Christ all things in heaven and on earth
will be “united,” “gathered up,” “summed up,” “recapitulated,” “brought
together under a single head.” This is Paul’s vision, shrouded in mystery, of
the end for which all things were created: the mystery of Christ “brought to
full stature.”
The goal of all creation is Jesus himself, the
“perfect man,” the body of Christ, head and members, all of humanity brought to
the fullness of perfection in the Church, “which is his body, the fullness of
him who fills all in all (Ephesians
1:3-10, 22-23, 4:11-13).
In that body all will be one, and all will “be
Christ.” Heaven is a communal experience. But all will also have their own
distinct, personal identity.
“Father, into your
hands...”
There is nothing more personal, more distinct
and individual, than an act of free choice. And that is what death is.
Death
is not just something that happens to us. Karl Rahner has pointed out that
death is the greatest free choice of our whole lives. When death comes, we have
to respond to it.
We
can die yelling, “No!” Or shrugging our shoulders and saying, “Okay” in stoic
resignation. But neither of those is a Christian death. A Christian must die
giving a positive “Yes!” to death. A yes to actual, physical death that matches
and brings to completion the yes we gave to the total reality of death when, as
Paul reminds us in Romans 6:3-9, we accepted to die with
Christ and in Christ at Baptism.
Do you not know that all of us who have been
baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been
buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from
the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.
While we are in our bodies we are still to some
extent “of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin.” Accepting death in Baptism
does not free us from the cultural conditioning, the infected attitudes,
values, compulsions and inhibitions “programmed” into us from the day we began
interacting with the human race. So we experience what Paul did: “I do not do
the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.... I delight in the
law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with
the law of my mind” (Romans 7:14-24).
It takes physical death to free us completely from this.
Because of Christ,
Christian death has a positive meaning: “What is essentially new about
Christian death is this: through Baptism, the Christian has already ‘died with
Christ’ sacramentally, in order to live a new life; and if we die in Christ's
grace, physical death completes this ‘dying with Christ’ and so completes our
incorporation into him in his redeeming act” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1010).
Luke 23:
44-49
gives us the model for this in Jesus’ own death: “Then Jesus, crying with a
loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said
this, he breathed his last.” To die as Christians we have to die as he did,
surrendering willingly to death for the sake of union with the Father. This is the
greatest free choice of our lives.
To
make it we have to rise to the fullness of pure faith, hope and love. Nothing
else can motivate this choice or make it possible. We are not saying yes to
death as such if we just accept it as relief from pain, or because life has
become boring. The acceptance of death in its true reality, and not just as an
idea, is more than choosing to stand up to a firing squad while alive as an
alternative to dishonor. The real experience of death is feeling ourselves
actually losing existence itself as we know it. Losing all we have and are.
There is nothing in this prospect of annihilation to say yes to unless we believe in what Jesus said about life
after death, hope in what he
promises, and love God, finally, with
our whole heart, soul and mind as the
All who is worth the sacrifice of everything else — absolutely everything and
everyone. Death is our first act of observing the First Commandment completely.
Purification,
not “Purgatory”
Whatever
transition from partial to total faith, hope and love is required for a given
individual to arrive at this full and freeing act of surrender to God in death
is the true meaning of “Purgatory.”
“Purgatory”
is a misleading word. It is not a place
where people spend time prior to
“entering heaven.” Only bodies can be in time and space; so after death there
is neither: just eternity. A better word is just “the purification.” If we do
not have the pure faith and hope we need to say “Yes!” to death with undivided
love of God, there must be a transition.
That need not involve time.
The
Church speaks officially of this purification as a “temporal punishment (poena temporalis) due to sin.” We can
translate poena as “punishment” or
more accurately as “penalty”; that is, as the natural consequence of the “sin”
or “shortcoming” (in New Testament Greek hamartia:
to “miss”) of not trying fervently enough during life to love God with all our
heart, soul and mind. If we haven’t grown to perfect faith, hope and love by
the time we face death, we have to do that before we can see God as he is.
Because this transition has a before and after, we call it “temporal” — not to
say it takes place in “time,” but just to distinguish it from “eternity.”
“Purgatory,”
then, is the transition from faith mixed with dependence on human evidence,
from hope mixed with dependence on human reassurance, and from divided love
mixed with human self-seeking to pure acceptance of all three as divine gift.
We make this transition in the act of saying “Yes!” to death” “Father, into your
hands I commend my spirit!”
The
only “pain” in this transition comes from our resistance to change. We fight
the changeover from dependence on our natural guidance system — our senses,
intellect and emotions — to total abandonment to the voice and word of God.
This transition, and the pain it involves, is “measured” by its intensity. But
we found it easier, especially when teaching children, to explain it in terms
of a longer or shorter “time” spent in a “place,” enduring “punishment.” We
were taught that, even though our sins were forgiven, a just (understand
“vengeful”) God still required us to “pay” for what we had done. That was
common teaching in the Church, but it
was never the teaching of the Church.
This
is one example of the Church being “careless about our
instruction in the faith, or presenting its teaching falsely” that the bishops in the
Second Vatican Council acknowledged as having “concealed
rather than revealed the true nature of God and of religion.” Because of this,
the Council “urges all concerned to remove or correct any abuses, excesses or
defects which may have crept in here or there, and so restore all things that
Christ and God be more fully praised.” “All concerned” includes all of us who
by Baptism have been made “stewards of the manifold grace of God,” and
responsible for the establishment of the Kingdom of God: a “kingdom of truth” before all. We might begin by correcting the misleading
explanation of “Purgatory” that falsifies our notion of God. [1]
Insight
How do I feel about death? Do I look forward to
the day of my total “Yes”?
Initiative
Prepare for dying by doing what gives growth in
faith, hope and love.
Non-Negotiable: All
For All
(Same Day) Thirty-first Week of Year II Wednesday November 2, 2016
The Responsorial Psalm teaches us to focus: “The Lord is my light and my salvation” (Psalm 27).
In Philippians 2: 12-18 Paul reminds us, “It is God who is at work
in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his benevolent purposes.” Any
good we do or even desire, we do by the power of God working with us, in us and through us.
What
do we have that is not God’s gift to us? Our bodies, our brains, our skills and
the energy to use them, our very life is his gift. But this gift cannot be
given once and for all; of necessity it is being
given every moment. Otherwise we would just fall into non-existence.
This
puts stewardship on a very radical
basis: if all we have and are depends on God working right now within us, we
are by nature not absolute owners, but managers.
We have to use all the control we have over God’s working within us to direct
his work and ours to the accomplishment of his purposes.
The
same is true of our possessions. Each and every one of them is God’s gift to
us. He created them, sustains them in existence, and is within each one of
them, making each do for us what it does. In and through everything we have,
God is giving us something of himself. God is the good we desire and enjoy in
all.
So
what is there to be surprised at if Paul says his death is of no concern to him
and should not be to his friends?
Even if I am being poured out as a libation over
the… offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with all of you -- and in
the same way you also must be glad and rejoice with me.
Paul
lives only for the kingdom, and sees everything in the light of what will be
when it is established:
As I look to the day of Christ, you give me
cause to boast that I did not run the race in vain or work to no purpose.
This
is salvation. If we try to “save” our
lives by keeping them for ourselves, we live “in vain.” We lose them. If we
abandon all to God and for God we find the All.1
In
Luke 14: 25-33 Jesus says the Life
he gives is an “All for all” proposition. There is no “partial salvation.” We
must seek, at least, to love God with all
our heart or we don’t love him as God. This calls us to total abandonment. Any
love for parents, spouse, children, or anything else is illusory — false and
inauthentic — if it conflicts with total abandonment to God.
Jesus
invites us as prudent stewards to “sit down and calculate” what we need to give
for what we want to get. The cost of discipleship is to “give up all your
possessions” and manage them for God as stewards.
1Luke 9:24.
Initiative:
Be Christ’s steward. Manage prudently the gift of love.
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