Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle C

Luke 20:27-38

Whenever I hear this gospel, I remember a particular day during my first year of marriage when my new wife and I were at Sunday Mass. This was the gospel that was proclaimed that day, and as I stood there I felt a twinge of sadness. I wanted to be married to her forever! I didn't want it to end with death. And after fifty years part of me still feels that way.

But I guess this gospel is not really about marriage. It does say something about the next life though. The first thing is that those who are deemed worthy will no longer die, for they are like angels. We've all seen cartoons showing dead people sitting on clouds with little wings and halos, usually holding a harp. They don't look a lot different from cartoons of angels. But we know something about angels from scripture. They are supernatural beings; they have no bodies. People who study these kinds of things have identified nine levels of supernatural beings and even figured out what they do. The highest three ranks do nothing but sing praises to God for all eternity. The next three are in charge of communicating God's will to the lower angels; they are the architects and designers of the universe. The lowest three are the ones who actually do the work. At the very bottom are the ones who are our guardian angels, who God puts in charge of protecting us from the fallen angels. Archangels, of course, are met in scripture and are thought to be direct messengers of God to individual humans. What they all have in common though is that they behold the face of God, even when they are carrying out his will. And that's how we will be like angels.

But Jesus goes on to say that these ones who can no longer die, who are like angels, are the children of God, the ones who will rise. Jesus means physical resurrection; our bodies will live again; and that's part of the Creed that most Christians recite, even though during this age I suspect few believe it, or think about the implications. One of the implications is that our bodies are precious – or perhaps we should say our whole being is precious to God, material and spiritual alike. If that's true, it should color how we treat each other and how we treat ourselves. When we meet another person, we remember that God wants that person to live eternally because he is madly in love with him or her. A second implication is that we humans aren't meant to be forever without bodies; we may be like angels for a while, but we are completely human when we rise from the dead. We can imagine how that might be – Jesus gave us a glimpse of a resurrected body, who could appear in locked rooms and move about without concern for distance or time; but a body nevertheless that carried the scars of his life, the nail wounds in the hands and feet, the sword wound in the side. A body nevertheless who could eat and drink. A body which will for all eternity be male or female.

The third point Jesus makes is that we will all be alive because to God all are alive. We will derive our eternal lives because we are alive to God right now, and God transcends space and time; therefore right now we are part of that mass of humanity that lives forever in God.

But I think the best news is that we will not marry or be given in marriage. Marriage is a wonderful thing, and I will never regret being married. But there are some things about human marriage – we start out as a man and woman who unfortunately are fallen. We are capable of causing a lot of pain to each other, and I don't think any marriage is without a little pain here and there, because we are human. Marriage is also meant to be exclusive; that means that the kind of love you have for your spouse or at least should have, cannot be shared with anyone else. This love is supposed to be freely given with no coercion. It actually takes a great deal of work to get to that point, since we are all subjected to mood changes, hurt feelings, misunderstandings – and sometimes addictions, all of which can make us hold back from the free giving. The kind of love spouses have should be total; nothing, not even the love of children, should come between the spouses. The love should be faithful, in that friendships with members of the same or opposite sex cannot get in the way, nor can the love of a parent of a sibling; faithful means always choosing the spouse over others. Finally, the love must be fruitful. God, who is love, is infinitely fruitful; the universe and all it contains is the product of that love. A married couple should work to help each other follow Christ's command to bear fruit.

As you can imagine, even a lifetime is probably not long enough for a couple to achieve the kind of love they are called to live, and that's assuming they are working at it. Unfortunately, many couples stop working on their marital relationship and lapse into a sort of companionship.

But once you start to think about what marriage is really for, you begin to see that it is a wonderful tool for two people to lose their self-centeredness, to learn to live for others, to actually practice love and other virtues; in short, marriage is meant to get us into heaven, and once we are there, there is no longer a need for it; and if we don't get there, then it doesn't matter. It seems as though God calls most people to marriage. God leaves a few people around to remind us that marriage is temporary; great as it is it is only for this life; and the fact that we encounter holy souls who are unmarried reminds us that in the end only God is the spouse of every soul.

Marriage is the model of how God loves his people, how Christ loves His Church; we see that explicitly stated in the Old and New Testaments. And as we learn to love one other person in this way, we are preparing ourselves for heaven, where in the presence of Love itself, we will enter into the Great Marriage which will include all the saved, and God himself.