St. Paul: “We do not want you to grieve like those who have no hope.” And Our Lord: “Be vigilant and stay awake; you do not know the day or the hour.” And King Solomon: “Keep vigil with wisdom and you will be free from care.” King David: “My soul is thirsting for you, my God.” This Sunday is all about hope. And the readings really beautifully describe our Christian approach to the fears and pains of the life that we live.
I’ve always loved St. Paul’s remarks about this in I Thessalonians. Don’t grieve like those who have no hope. He doesn’t say not to grieve at all. Grieving with hope is totally different from not grieving at all. Sometimes people, both inside and outside the church, get this wrong about Faith: they think it’s some kind of magic trick to make all your difficulties miraculously disappear. But that’s not the case: remember, the central icon of our Faith is a representation of suffering. That’s not for nothing. We keep Christ on the Cross because our Faith is profoundly realistic. This life is hard. There’s suffering. There’s loss. There’s injustice. There’s even betrayal. These are all things that we see when we look to the Holy Cross. These are realities. But they’re not the only realities. And that’s realistic too. We also know that there is goodness at the core of our existence, at the core of reality. The Cross doesn’t have the last word. It’s not the end of the story. The cross is real, yes. Suffering and death and loss and betrayal are real, yes. These things sadden and aggrieve us, yes. But we still have hope because we know that God is going to make everything all right in the end. We can grieve at the things that sadden us, but our grief is always infused with a deep mixture of Christian Hope. We grieve at times, but we grieve in a Christian way.
We take these things seriously because, as Our Lord reminds us, “we do not know the day or the hour.” It’s been fairly popular throughout the 2000-year history of the church for various people to claim they know when the end of the world is going to come. A lot of people in the earliest days thought it would happen imminently. A lot of people thought it would happen in the year 1000. And then again in the year 2000. And then again in 2012. And then again, like, yesterday. The truth is, nobody knows. The end of the world will happen sometime. Maybe this afternoon; maybe in 100,000 years. But a more important concern for us, is that, one way or the other, that day and that hour are going to come for us, before too terribly long. And so we should take our relationship with God seriously, because it’s the relationship that will define all of eternity for us. And that should give us peace: “keep vigil with the wisdom of God and you will be free from care.” So we stir up in our hearts a true longing for God, a longing to be with him. Not in a goulish way, but we do look forward to going to heaven, even the process of getting there involves a lot of pain and difficulty. Because we look forward to being freed from all our burdens and being perfectly united with the one who makes everything in our hearts come to rest. The funeral liturgy talks about those who are saddened by the certainty of dying being consoled by the promise of immortality to come. For life is changed, not ended. And when our time on this earth is done, a new home will be ready for us in heaven. In the face of reality, that’s great news.
So, I’m sorry if this has been a bit of a “downer:” but I think it’s always good for us to see that our Faith, sort of uniquely, doesn’t shy away from reality. We’re realists. We know that what this world can offer us is limited, and life can involve a fair amount of struggle and pain. But the key is this: for us, this dose of reality is okay. We know that we have eternity waiting for us, so we don’t have to put that much pressure on this life. It’s okay that things here aren’t perfect; that doesn’t make our existence a failure, because God is waiting for us in eternity. Which means we can truly enjoy this life for what it is: full of joys and opportunities and wonderful moments and experiences: but it’s only a prologue. A prologue to an eternity spent in loving arms of Our Savior. May the Queen of Heaven, St. Joseph the Patron of the Happy Death, our guardian angels, and all the angels and saints, accompany us with their comfort and their prayers as we seek the peace of the Lord in all things.