November 22, 2025 – Saturday of the 33rd week of OT
1 Maccabees 6:1-13; Luke 20:27-40
Homily
Dear brothers and sisters,
When we try to imagine what life will be like after our physical death, we can only do so by using images that correspond to our life here on earth. This is what Scripture does, both in the Old and New Testaments. It is even what Jesus does in His parables, when He describes either eternal happiness with God or eternal unhappiness if we have not lived here on earth in love.
Obviously, we can only imagine the afterlife by using images. And the only images we have are those that correspond to our senses: what we can see, hear, touch, and smell. There is nothing wrong with using all the images we have to represent life in the afterlife. But the important thing is not to forget that reality is quite different and infinitely more beautiful than anything we can express through these images.
In Jesus' time, there were two major schools of thought among the teachers in Israel: the Pharisees, who believed in the resurrection of the dead, that is, in life after death, and the Sadducees, who did not believe in it. In the Gospel passage we have just read, it is they who try to trap Jesus by imagining a rather implausible story of a woman who had seven husbands, one after the other. They ask Jesus whose wife she will be in heaven.
Jesus' answer is that they have understood nothing. They imagine life in the afterlife as a continuation of physical life here on earth. It will be something completely different. Here on earth, our life is subject to the limits of time and place. We always live in a specific moment and in a specific place. God, with whom we will share our existence, is beyond these limits. Our relationship with God consists entirely in the fact of being a relationship—a relationship of love. Jesus quotes a word addressed to Moses, where God presents Himself to him as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. These men did not live at the same time. If God is—and not was—the God of each of them, it is because they are all alive, even after the few years they lived on earth. He is not the God of the dead. He is the God of the living. If He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then He is also and will always remain the God of each one of us.
And this should make us aware of something similar concerning all the truths of faith. God is greater—infinitely greater than anything we can say, think, or feel about Him. All the images and formulas we use to speak of God and divine things, including the most important dogmatic definitions, are only weak approximations of a Reality infinitely greater and more beautiful than anything we can say or think about it. This should make us very humble about all our knowledge and experience of divine things and make us understanding toward other people who may express the same realities in terms quite different from our own, even if they seem logically contradictory to us. The only thing that ultimately matters is our relationship with God, a relationship that is love—the only true form of knowledge of God.
Today we commemorate Saint Cecilia, virgin and martyr.
Armand Veilleux