Fifth Sunday of Easter – 7 May 2023
Is one lifetime enough? Well, some of us I am sure would answer, “Absolutely!” Others of us would not be so sure. To some people immortality is at its best a doubtful blessing. Others find it downright undesirable. There was one man who wrote his own epitaph. It said, “Don’t bother me now; don’t bother me ever. I want to be dead forever and ever.” Clearly, in the minds of some people this one life is enough. They do not want, nor do they see, the necessity for another.
That attitude may seem strange to us, even repugnant. Yet perhaps all of us have had moments where we have thought this to be a sufficient stance to take. When we are tired and discouraged this one life can seem like enough. We have no eager desire to struggle with it forever. On the other hand, we often feel that one lifetime is all too short. Toward the end of his career, a student asked William James, a widely respected philosopher at Harvard University at the end of the 19th century, if he believed in life after death, and he replied, “Never very strongly. But the older I get, the more inclined I am to believe it.” The student asked “Why?” And the distinguished professor answered, “Because I am just getting fit to live.”
Whatever our thoughts and feelings we can say with certainty, though, that eternal life was indispensable to the plans and purposes of Jesus. This is not to say he was never discouraged, for clearly he was. But he lived the kind of life and pursued the kind of goals that needed an eternity for its truth to manifest itself. Looking death squarely in the face, he said to his disciples: “I am going to prepare a place for you; and then I will come back and take you with me, and where I am you also may be.” That is how Jesus thought about death. It would not be the end of his work; nor would it be the end of his involvement with the people he loved. Everything about which he cared required immortality. Life after death mattered supremely to him.
Jesus’ whole life was an adventure based upon the conviction of more life to come. He loved people with his whole heart, and he allowed them to learn to love him in the same sway. He did this in the full knowledge that he would soon be taken from then. The greater the love, the greater the pain when death pulls us apart. There is however one thing which cuts the loss in half, and that is the firm faith that the separation is not forever. Jesus counted on that. “I shall come back to take you with me,” he said, “that where I am you also may be.” If we care about the things for which Jesus cared, if we love as he loved, this one life can never be enough. Eternity was an essential part of his plans. For him, and all who share his life, life after death really does matter.
But not only does Jesus open for us the possibility of more life, a life that not even death can extinguish, he shows us what that life is like. For he is the way, the truth, and the life. Some years ago, Pope Benedict expressed this so beautifully using the imagery of a symphony orchestra:
“We can compare the cosmos to a “book” – Galileo himself used this example – and consider it as “the work of an author who expresses himself through the ‘symphony’ of creation. In this symphony one finds, at a certain point, what would be called in musical terms a ‘solo’, a theme entrusted to a single instrument or voice which is so important that the meaning of the entire work depends on it. This ‘solo’ is Jesus. … The Son of Man recapitulates in himself earth and heaven, creation and the Creator, flesh and Spirit. He is the centre of the cosmos and of history, for in him converge without confusion the author and his work”.[1]
Jesus discloses to us, in his very self, all that God calls us to, the life that we are invited to absorb and to grow into both now and eternally. As for the disciples in the Gospel so too for us there is a profound challenge: to keep coming back to Him. It is the one that Pope Francis puts constantly before us.
“I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them; I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day. No one should think that this invitation is not meant for him or her . . . The Lord does not disappoint those who take this risk; whenever we take a step towards Jesus, we come to realise he is already there, waiting for us with open arms. Now is the time to say to Jesus; ‘Lord, I have let myself by deceived; in a thousand ways I have shunned your love, yet here I am once more, to renew my covenant with you. I need you. Save me once again, Lord, take me once more into your redeeming embrace.”[2]
Echoing Pope Benedict’s words, Pope Francis is clear that, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life new horizon and a decisive direction.”[3] As he preached immediately after his election.
“We can walk as much as we want, we can build many things, but if we do not profess Jesus Christ, things go wrong. We may become a charitable NGO, but not the Church, the Bride of the Lord. When we are not walking, we stop moving. When we are not building on the stones, what happens? The same thing that happens to children on the beach when they build sandcastles: everything is swept away, there is no solidity.”[4]
At the very dawn of Christian life in the 2nd century Ignatius of Antioch wrote, “Apart from him let nothing fascinate you.”[5] It is one of my favourite sayings. May we ever grow in our fascination of Jesus. For it is a deepening fascination with Jesus that bursts open our limited and confining expectations about life and about living and introduces us to a possibility of life beyond what we have dared to imagine.
[1] Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini: On the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church,” Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation (30 September 2010).
[2] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium The Joy of the Gospels; Apostolic Exhortation on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World (24 November 2013), n. 3.
[3] Evangelii Gaudium, n.7, with reference, Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (25 December, 2005), 1.
[4] Pope Francis, Homily at “Missa Pro Ecclesia” with the Cardinal Electors, 14 March 2013)
[5] Ignatius of Antioch, “The Letter to the Ephesians”, n.11, in The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A reader, edited by Bart D. Ehrman, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 320.
