Now that we’ve passed Halloween, it’s that time of the year again: we hear many familiar themes, and we’re all getting ready for that one day that puts an end to the year. I’m not talking about the wave of commercials crashing over us that are trying to get us ready for Christmas. I’m talking about the end of the Liturgical Year at the Solemnity of Christ the King, and the readings that prepare us for that celebration by preparing us for the end times when Christ’s reign will be made totally manifest to all.
The question that the readings pose to us this week is one that we should not take lightly. Sure, we might have a quick answer, but if we really start to think about it, perhaps we would not answer so quickly. The question is: what are you willing to put aside in order to enter in heaven?
The question comes to us in the first reading, when we hear what a mother and her sons are willing to give up in order to remain faithful to God and share in the heavenly rewards, rather than break the Law given by God through Moses and eat pork. Now, I’m sure that we’d all like to say that we would certainly rather go to heaven than eat a particular food. Very few of us would probably admit to preferring bacon to Jesus. But, if we take a moment, and think about what happens in Lent on Ash Wednesday, and all the Fridays of Lent, we may not be so quick to answer. How many of us enter into that mental debate on those days, of whether it’s really serious to eat meat, and whether it will make that big of a difference. Maybe some of us have even given in at one point or another in our life (and I’m not talking about the occasions where we just forgot, but where we freely made a choice to eat meat, rather than obey God and His Church). While eating meat on Fridays during Lent may not necessarily cast us to hell, it is interesting to think that, at times, we might prefer eating a particular food and satisfying our taste buds than being obedient to God through the apostles and their successors, who have, by divine mandate, the ability to loose and bind sins.
But, even tougher than giving up meat, is the decision that the same family in the second book of Maccabees has to make. It would have been quite easy simply to taste a little pork, to disobey God’s law, all with the mindset: “Well, I wouldn’t do this if I were free, and I just want to protect my family, so I’ll give in.” While there may be times where, because the kids are acting up, we would have no problem sacrificing the kids in order to go to heaven, still, I think that most, if not all mothers and fathers, when faced with the decision to save their kids life, would do almost anything in order to protect their children.
But of course, as Jesus says in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, “‘Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna,’” that is, hell. Heaven is worth even more than bonds that bind us as a family, and we must be willing to put obedience to God and His truth that He has revealed to us even over the good of our family. Nothing is more important than union with God.
And in the Gospel, Jesus tells the Sadducees that they have missed the point of heaven if they simply assume that heaven is earth version 2.0. Even the bonds of marriage, a sacrament which shows forth Christ’s fidelity to His Church to all the world by the fidelity of the husband to his wife; a love which shows the fruitfulness of God’s love by the fruitfulness of the marital act either through openness to children or, for those who, through no fault of their own cannot have children, through helping to communicate God’s love to those who so often do not receive it by works of charity; even that love is not the most important love in heaven, for those who “‘are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age…neither marry nor are given in marriage.’”
Does this mean that we won’t recognize our spouse in heaven? I don’t think that Jesus means that we won’t recognize each other. But the unique, intense love that marriage is supposed to witness here on earth, will most perfectly be directed to God, whom we should love above all things and all people, even a spouse.
So how do we prepare for making such a big choice? How can we practice what the mother and sons in the first reading practiced, and prepare for eternal life when the sacramental system will no longer be necessary, because God will be all in all to those who have entered into heaven, and will communicate His grace, His inner life, His love, directly to us?
I’m certainly not suggesting that we abandon all family responsibilities and move into a monastery, no matter how tempting that might sound from time to time. Rather, each day, in very little ways, we have choices which can confirm us in choosing God over others, or confirm us in choosing others over God. Whether it’s unnecessary work on Sunday, putting sports above our worship of God, laughing at crass jokes that insult the faith so that we can make it farther in our profession, and many other ways which only you will know as they face you, God provides us many small ways in which we can show our love and our loyalty to Him above all else.
God loves us, and wants us to share eternity with Him in heaven, where Jesus will reign as eternal king. But God loves us enough to respect our free choice to return that love or reject that love. Let’s show, by our daily sacrifices and fidelity to the Gospel, that we do love Him, and want to be with Him forever, faithful subjects of Christ the King.
