Let God Surprise You!
1st Reading: 2 Maccabees 7: 1-2, 9-14
2nd Reading: 2 Thessalonians 2: 16-35
Gospel: Luke 20: 27-3
Homily: Myrtle Hendricks Corrales
The common theme of today’s readings is the belief that we will be raised up after death to a new kind of life.
Our first reading from Maccabees was written during the time when the Greeks dominated the biblical world. The Greek rulers forced people to abandon their religious culture and values and to adopt Greek ones. The stories about courageous ancestors who choose to die rather than appear disloyal to their God are intended to inspire the readers to overcome fear and to be God’s courageous people who plan to live forever.
The second reading from Thessalonians is asking God to strengthen the hearts of the baptized so they shed light on the risen Jesus’s presence in their midst and for deliverance from wicked people who do not believe that Jesus rose from the dead.
In the gospel reading, the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection, attempt to discredit Jesus. They concoct the story of the woman with seven husbands. Jesus answers that resurrection is not the continuation of life as we know it. Not only does Jesus refuse to name one of the men as the woman’s husband but uses the image of marriage to teach about life in God’s kingdom; that is, the sacred shared life of a married couple is a foreshadowing of intimacy that God’s children will have together in the age to come.
After a robust 2 ½ hour meeting discussing the theme of the readings, we planners decided to address the dramatic, profound mysteries of resurrection, heaven, and hell.
In PAX, we are on a communal journey of faith seeking understanding. We embrace the mystery, the awe, the hope of our faith.
My son, Peter, and I visited Charles Schehl about 10 days before he died. As in any conversation with Charles, we walked away with so much more than we gave. It was a spiritual moment as Charles shared his spirituality and questions about faith and resurrection. I told Charles that just before his death, my brother told me that death is the last greatest adventure that anybody gets to have. The last greatest unknown that we dive into headfirst into the loving arms of God. Charles smiled and agreed.
We can’t know what happens at death, at resurrection; our faith tells us that after death something very profound happens. Perhaps this is when God surprises us.
In 2018, Pope Francis created a stir when he spoke on the theology of hell. Social media printed sensational reports that the Pope denied the existence of hell. Actually, Pope Francis stated what most contemporary theologians believe about hell.
In moral theology, there is the concept of fundamental option; our fundamental option is how we choose to live our daily lives. It can be a life of seeking to do good, to protect the powerless, to promote nonviolence, to be in service to others, a life toward God. Or it (may be) a life of deceit, unkindness, abuse of the powerless, arrogance and selfishness. Our fundamental option is our moral fiber, our core values and how we live them. Do we live a life reflecting the love of God or do we choose a path away from God?
When humanity comes to resurrection, God invites everyone in, regardless of how one has lived out their fundamental option. The surprise of God is that God always says yes to us. God is our loving parent; think of how you love your children or godchildren or nieces and nephews. Is there really anything they could do that you would want to send them to eternal suffering and loneliness?
The surprise of God is that because of God’s infinite love for us, God is ultimately powerless. God always invites us to come into the kingdom, we are the ones who say no, not God. If we have lived our fundamental option toward God, we say yes to God’s warm embrace to enter the kingdom of God’s love. If we have lived our lives, our fundamental option, away from God, closed our hearts to God, at death God still asks us to enter the kingdom of God’s love. God does not say no to us. We say no to God. God did not create hell, we did. When we close our hearts and say no to God, this is hell.
Most theologians agree with Pope Francis in his statement that we choose to go to Hell when we want to be distant from God because we do not want God’s love. Hell is the absence of love, companionship, communion that we choose; God does not send us there.
At the profound moment of resurrection, Jesus tells us we begin a new existence embraced in God’s love. Perhaps it is as my brother saw it: the last greatest unknown adventure; for me, it is a loving mystery of our faith. It is a time to let God surprise me.
I wish to close with this verse and refrain from the song Mystery we sing at our Pax celebrations:
I run through the sunlight and the shadows of the years,
I can feel a strong sensation through the silence of the spheres.
I can hear a call to love all, to immortality.
Then I know I have known mystery.
It’s the song of the universe, as the eons fall away.
It’s the song that the stars sing and all the planets play.
It’s a song to the Power neither you nor I can see.
It’s a song to the One who is Mystery.
Peter Hendricks (here are the texts shared today)
Eucatastrophe is a neologism coined by J.R.R. Tolkien from Greek ευ– “good” and καταστροφή “sudden turn”.
In essence, a eucatastrophe is a massive turn in fortune from a seemingly unconquerable situation to an unforseen victory, usually brought by grace rather than heroic effort. Such a turn is catastrophic in the sense of its breadth and surprise and positive in that a great evil or misfortune is averted.
“I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary ‘truth’ on the second plane (….) – that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.” J.R.R. Tolkien
James Martin SJ on “God is a God of surprises!” from his Facebook page (Easter 2013):
Christ is risen! Alleluia! God is a God of surprises!
What is the message of Easter? Well, it is an inexhaustible and infinite mystery that cannot be summarized, contained, or defined. Easter is the event that first changed the disciples, and later would change human history.
It is a truth about a person: Jesus, who was crucified, who died and who was buried, was raised from the dead, and appeared to his friends and followers on Easter Sunday, and for many days afterwards. His disciples, who had been cowering behind closed doors, were transformed into men and women ready to die for him; only something as dramatic as the Resurrection appearances could do this. And his divinity, which had been a source of questioning and controversy during his public ministry, was fully and definitively revealed to all.
It is a truth about our faith: even though we may be tempted to despair, hope in God is never disappointed; even though our lives seem to be at a dead end, God always offers us a path; even though all the doors in our life seem to be closed, God will always open one. And even though our relationship with God may seem to be dead, God is always waiting for us with open arms, to invite us into new life.
It is a truth about our world: in the end, hope always triumphs over despair, love always triumphs over hate, and life always triumphs over death.
Easter shows us that, as the Angel Gabriel said to Mary at the Annunciation, the event that began Jesus’s earthly life, truly nothing is impossible with God. And God is a God of surprises. Jesus’s earthly life begins with a surprise to Mary; and his eternal life begins with a surprise to another Mary, and then to his followers. Our human expectations of what God can do are just that: human expectations. Never forget that God’s power is greater than we can possibly imagine.
May the joy of the Risen Christ fill your lives today and make every day of your life an Easter morning. Alleluia!