“Death is but a passing from this life to the next,” is how I define eternal life. Where that eternal life is depends on how you live your current life. If you are like the Sadducees in St. Luke’s Gospel today, you will spend it in hell. If you follow Jesus’ logic, you will be heaven in love with everyone you have ever loved on earth. After all, isn’t love God’s focus?
To recognize the journey to heaven takes effort to identify because it calls for us to balance what the world illustrates as the right path versus Jesus’ definition. The former bases its road map on taking advantage of situations that will allow you succeed financially, in power and in fame so you can control your life circumstances.
Jesus takes His cue from His Father who starts everything from a standpoint of love. He created all of us from His love asking that as He loves us we also love Him with our heart, soul, mind and strength, as well as loving all He created as Jesus loves us.
Love’s prime directive is a virtue of selflessness. If you take care of others, they will take care of you. In the Catholic Church, our Baptism solidifies that with a promise to be obedient to the will of God, as was Jesus in his dying on the cross for our sins and being raised from the dead so the gates of heaven are opened to us for the eternal life we want.
Being ready for all this takes effort. Sometimes it calls for us to make the ultimate choice of martyrdom rather than cave in to being forced against our will to follow an alternate way of life that denies what God has taught is true and faithful.
That is what happened in our first reading from Second Maccabees with the seven brothers and mother of the Maccabee family when the Greeks forced the Jews to deny God to adopt their pagan gods. As the fourth brother said before his death: “It is my choice to die at the hands of men with the hope God gives of being raised up by Him…”
In our second reading, St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, he encourages the Christian believers to follow the ways of God in their hearts “in every good deed and word” because of God’s “everlasting encouragement and good hope through His grace.” St. Paul wants followers to understand that many do not have faith and would rather believe in an easier path of wickedness and sin by embracing earthly desires which gives them current pleasures; an easier road than what God calls us to do.
This week, let us pray for courage and strength to avoid times of temptation that avoid weakness in our promise to follow God and His ways. Let us look at ways to be bold in our thoughts, words and deeds when we confront a world that tries to lead us astray from the eternal life we seek. God, in His focus of love, offers us everything we need to live a good, faithful life, so when it is our time be in heaven with God, His angels and saints, we will know we fought the good fight with His help and love.
Reading 1: Second Maccabees 7: 1-2, 9-14
Reading 2: Second Thessalonians 2: 16 – 3: 5
Gospel: Luke 20: 27-38
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