It was January 2004, the last year of my dad’s life. Dad had had a heart valve replaced when he was 80 years old, and now at the age of 89 was facing another heart valve replacement. I took him down to Mayo Clinic in Rochester for him to get a second opinion from one of the cardiologists. The cardiologist, after having examined dad and all of dad’s tests, sat with us and said to dad, “Walter, you can have this heart valve replaced. However, I cannot guarantee that the surgery will make your life better, nor can I guarantee that it will prolong your life.” My dad, was a mechanical engineer, and I saw expressed in his face the logic that guided him professionally most of his life. He looked at the doctor and replied, “Hell, I am 89 years old. I am not going to live forever.” He decided to not have the surgery and died from congestive heart failure in November of 2004.
The scripture readings for this weekend force us to face that which my dad confronted in January 2004. We are finite beings and our bodies are going to breakdown and eventually die. While we are still alive in our bodies, we are giving a choice. Do we wish to cultivate and grow our relationship with God, or, do we wish to ignore the relationship that God offers us? The choice is exclusively ours.
The first reading from the second book of Maccabees (part of the historical books in the Catholic Bible, and in the apocrypha in the Protestant Bible) is a rather macabre, grisly tale of a Jewish mother and her seven sons being tortured, maimed, and then burned alive at the order of the Greek King Antiochus. Their crime was refusing to eat meat that had been sacrificed to the Greek gods. They chose to be in relationship with God and suffer a horrible death, rather than to destroy their relationship with God and live. In reading the full story from the second book of Maccabees (2 Maccabees 7:1-42) the mother tells her sons that their relationship with God is closer and supersedes even that of a mother for her children. The mother consuls one of her sons, “Son, have pity on me, who carried you in my womb for nine months, nursed you for three years, brought you up, educated and supported you to your present age. I beg you, child, to look at the heavens and the earth and see all that is in them; then you will know that God did not make them out of existing things. In the same way humankind came into existence. Do not be afraid of this executioner, but be worthy of your brothers and accept death, so that in the time of mercy I may receive you again with your brothers.”
The Gospel reading is the familiar story of the Sadducees challenging Jesus’ teaching about resurrection and everlasting life. They pose to Jesus, a story of a woman, who over time had married seven brothers, widowed at each marriage and who eventually died never having borne any children. They ask Jesus, if there is a resurrection, to which husband would she be married? (I must interject at this juncture, that this Gospel story always reminds me of an inappropriate Ole and Lena joke, in which Lena is married to Ole, widowed, and then, marries, Hans, widowed again, and then marries Sven, and is widowed again. The only difference from the Gospel story is that Lena had a very fruitful life having giving birth to 24 children collectively during her marriages to Ole, Hans, and Sven.) Jesus replies that life after death is not consumed with the relationships we formed during life, but rather, overwhelmingly consumed in being in relationship with God.
These two readings remind us that God entered into relationship with us at the moment we were conceived in our mother’s womb. We were named and claimed by God at that very moment. Our relationship with God is ultimately the most important relationship in our lives. God has always been in relationship with us, even when we refuse to acknowledge that very relationship. In the Gospels, Jesus points out that instead of being self-consumed and focused only in our present life, ultimate happiness rests in the relationship we cultivate with God. What is in the present is temporary. What lies beyond the present is everlasting. The pastoral letters of Paul, John, James, and Peter teach the same lesson. That which human beings consider treasure, e.g. gold, silver etc, in this world, rusts, disintegrates and passes away. That treasure that lasts forever is the relationship we have with God. Are we going to spend our lives chasing after treasure that is no more than a mirage, or are going to spend our lives pursuing a treasure that will last into eternity?
The goal of our life is not that which we will find in the present. The goal of our life must focus on that which will be. Our life after death will mirror the relationships we have with others in this life. If our life is self-focused, and self-consumed, than the future of our life after death will be one of isolation from God and others. If our relationships with others are unloving and only formed to satisfy ourselves, eternity will be filled with the emptiness and darkness of the relationships we had. If our relationships with others were that of unselfish love for others, then those relationships will be stepping stones to an everlasting life of love, happiness and fulfillment with God. Again, this is a message we hear preached not only by Jesus in the Gospels, but repeated in the pastoral letters of Paul, Peter, John and James.
As my dad so succinctly expressed in January of 2004, we do not live forever. Our bodies are going to wear out and eventually die. My dad was a person of great honesty, integrity and compassion. He did not fear death because he knew that the life and love that after death was going to surpass the life and love he had experienced in life. He knew that when he died, he would be swept up in God’s everlasting embrace of love. The fulfillment for which my dad strived and after which my dad sought, would be realized not in this life, but in everlasting life.
Woody Allen once said, “I don’t fear death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” None of us actively seek death. Our bodies are programmed to seek life. Let us program the lives we are living now, not for what we can find in the present, but that life which beckons beyond this life. Let us live lives that always seek the relationship we have had with God from the moment we were conceived.
