Homily 32 Sunday of Ordinary Time C November 6, 2022

 Homily    32 Sunday of Ordinary Time C    November 6, 2022

Last week we had the Annual Catholic Services Appeal and I dutifully preached on it.  Thank you for all who have responded.  However, I wish it had been this week, because I have found the readings that the Church gives us this week to be extraordinarily difficult to preach on.  Oh well.

In the Gospel the Sadducees try their luck in trapping Jesus.  They present Jesus with a very odd question.   Seven brothers in succession all marry this one women.  None of them have any children, and one after another the brothers die.  Finally the women dies.  (Probably of exhaustion).  And the Sadducees want to know whose wife she will be in the Resurrection?  The Sadducees were the anti-resurrection party.  They did not believe in resurrection.  That is why they were “sad-you-see”.    ….

The Sadducees try to put God in a box.  But of course, you cannot do that.  God exceeds our logic and all our attempts to comprehend God.  As St. Augustine of Hippo said, “whatever you think God is, that is NOT God.”  God does not fit into any of our rules or plans.  No thought can even grasp God.  God is beyond all of our categories. 

That does not mean we cannot say things about God that are true.  In our second reading St. Paul tell us “But the Lord is faithful….”  And indeed God is faithful.  We can rely on God’s Word, Jesus Christ. 

St. John tells us “God is love.”  And that is also true.  But that still leaves a lot of room for exploration. 

All of us must grapple with the mysterious but real nature of God.  How do we know that there really is a God?   And more importantly, how do I know God’s Will for me?  Is God a figment of my imagination, or an actual reality that grounds and sustains all of reality?

          This is a question each of us must answer for ourselves.  We cannot rely on anyone else to answer this for us.  It is a deeply personal answer. And it is not a once-for-ever answer.  It is not the case that once you resolve satisfactorily for yourself the issue whether God exists or not that you are done and finished.   As we age and develop we hopefully outgrow the answers that satisfied us earlier, and so must continue to expand and deepen our understanding of God. 

And the thing is, there is no end to this process.  There is no point, nor can there ever be a point, at which we come to a full and complete understanding of God.  Such an understanding doesn’t exist.

One of my favorite theologians, Karl Rahner, said that the incomprehensibility of God is the blessedness of man.  I liked that so much that I put it on my ordination holy card.  The incomprehensibility of God is the blessedness of man.

The fact that we will never be able to fully understand God is our blessedness.  Because once we fully comprehended God, there would be nothing more to live for, nothing more to explore, nothing more to learn.  There would be nothing more. 

But we will never do that.  For all eternity we will go deeper and deeper into the unfathomable mystery of God, forever learning, forever exploring, forever grasping new insights and deeper understanding of the transcendent nature of The True, The Good, The Beautiful:  of the fullest and most mind-blowing reality of God, and ever deeper and deeper into love.  That is our destiny as members of the Body of Christ.  And it is wonderful indeed!  

As we sang in our Psalm Response today: “Lord, when your glory appears, my joy will be full.”  

AMEN.