Wisdom 2, 1...3,9 ; Rom 8, 18-23 ; Luke 12, 35-28.40
H O M I L Y
A child was
playing on the sidewalk in front of his home; a car driver lost the control of
his car and killed the child. What do you say to the mother? A young woman was
filled with joy at the idea of giving birth to her first child, and she died
during the child delivery. What do you say to the husband? A young joined the
army of his country and went to what was supposed to be a peace‑keeping
operation, and was blown up in pieces. What do you say to the wife and
children?
There is
nothing to say, really. In most of these cases, only silence is appropriate. Any
philosophizing pious reflections about the meaning of death would be grotesque,
because death in absurd. It has no meaning. It is the disruption of meaning; it
is the brutal stopping of the dance of life, the rupture of a vital current,
the interruption of the process of growth.
What would you
have said to the mother of that young preacher who had announced that he was
bringing the fullness of life, and had manifested love and compassion to
everyone and who died as a criminal on a cross. There was nothing really that
you could have said. Death for him, like for anybody else, was a tragedy ‑‑
a tragedy that made him sweat blood and plead with his father to take away from
him that cup of bitterness. Before the death of others he had been moved to
compassion; before the prospect of his own death he was shaken and crying. Over
and beyond the human tragedy, there was also a divine tragedy in his death: the
experience of being abandoned by his father: "Father, Father, why have you
forsaken me?"
The Son of God
became man in order to tell us through his own life what human life was all
about. He did not simply pretend to be a man; he assumed all the limitations
and the conflicts of human existence. And all his life was a constant effort at
overcoming in his human existence these conflicts and at transcending these
limitations. By his preaching of the
Through his
death and resurrection Jesus revealed to us that death ‑‑ which
will never cease to be a terrible tragedy ‑‑ is not the end of everything;
that although it is deprived of any meaning, it cannot affect in anyway the meaning
of life; and that it is possible and necessary to hope, even in the most
desperate situations. What happened to him after his death revealed to us to
possibilities and the vocation of human nature; and his resurrection opened to
all of us the door of eternal life.
The human
family is one, but is composed, for the time being, of two large communities,
one on each shore of the river of eternity. Those who have landed on the other shore
without the total surrender to the father as that expressed by Jesus, and
without his unflinching hope, need our support. They need the support of our
prayer, and it is the purpose of this celebration; but most of all they need
the support of the quality of our life. We do not have to believe in
reincarnation, in order to know that they continue to live in us; and that it
is now in us and through us, their fellow human beings, that they can reach to
the purity that will allow the eyes of their bodies as well as the eyes of their
hearts to be totally penetrated by the divine light.
In their name as well as in ours let us
therefore join the holy man Job in proclaiming our hope: "As for me, I know
that my Vindicator lives, and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust; Whom
I myself shall see: my own eyes, not another's, shall behold him, and from my
flesh I shall see God; my inmost being is consumed with longing."