Of course as Christians we believe that human flourishing in this life is good – that God wills human flourishing. Yet we cannot collapse our end into this age. This is the mystery of our faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. We believe in the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting. Amen. We see this in Christ’s human nature. As Nicholas Healy in Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Chrisian Life writes, Christ’s “Ascension prepares heaven for us by having Christ’s humanity go there first, and it prepares us for heaven, which is not naturally our home. ‘Heaven’, though, is better understood not as a place but as a metaphor for life in ‘the Blessed Trinity, who is the light and the most high Spirit’ (ST 1.68.4).

Our Scriptures this week lead us into this mystery, that is, an analogy although the difference will always be more prominent than the likeness – which we can’t exactly draw. We’re not talking “near death experiences”, nor resuscitation. The resurrection and life eternal is a new order of life in which death is no longer a possibility. The end of our lives as human beings is to love God and enjoy God forever. This is the life of the resurrection. To move from Job to our Gospel reading to the Epistle can help a logic of the readings unfold.

Job 19:23-27a

Why would Job be so concerned to preserve the words that follow? His statement shows the difficulties in speaking of that which exceeds our experience – a similar difficulty, for instance, in speaking of what goes on in black holes. Do you notices paradoxes in Job’s speech? Why does he use have to use paradoxical language to describe the live of the resurrection? What would it be to “see God”?

Luke 20:27-38

Note that the position of the Sadducees is much like the scientific materialists that dominate our culture. All life is collapsed into one order of life, thus undercutting the transcendental significance of this life. Discuss how the logic of the Sadducees question presupposes a continuation of order – that the life of the resurrection, eternal life, is the “wish fulfillment”, merely an extension of this age. If one accepts that the life of the resurrection is on the same order as this age, what happens to the concept of resurrection?

How does Jesus describe the life of the resurrection as different? His reference to Moses is from Exodus 3 – digging out the narrative order that God is still the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob even though their death has been recorded already in Genesis. What is the difference between humans and God here? What/how does human life depend, now or in the age that is to come? How does Jesus see the relationship between temporal goods (a flourishing marriage, for instance) and the eternal Good – the life of the resurrection in the vision of God?

2 Thessalonians 2:13-3:5

Read the passage from 2 Thessalonians. How does the whole passage build to the last blessing/exhortation/prayer: May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.

As human beings, these passages remind us that we find the end of our life in this world, not in this world, but in God eternally through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. We do not have a humanism based exclusively within this world, a humanism that ironically undercuts the significance of each human life for the greater usefulness of a larger number of human flourishing – thus invading a country to give them the supposed chance of “human flourishing” that comes with “democracy” and the “free market” – a profoundly Sadducean logic that ends in violence, particularly violence and suffering among the poor. Taylor speaks of a “fundamental tension in Christianity” – “Flourishing is good, nevertheless seeking it is not our ultimate goal. But even where we renounce it, we re-affirm it because we follow God’s will in being a channel for it to others, and ultimately, to all” (p. 18). As Jesus said, “Unless a seed fall to the ground, it cannot live.” A Christian humanism is grounded on finding the ultimate flourishing of human life in seeing God and enjoying him forever. What happens if we forget eternal life in God as an end of our lives? How does the promise of this eternal life in God allow us to face the challenges in this world and remaining faithful to Jesus Christ?

Have a wonderful evening!