Always Discerning by Joseph A. Tetlow

Author:Joseph A. Tetlow [Tetlow, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012070, RELIGION / Christian Life/Personal Growth, REL062000, RELIGION / Spirituality, REL012120, RELIGION / Christian Life/Spiritual Growth
ISBN: 9780829444568
Publisher: Loyola Press
Published: 2016-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Anyhow, about the seven brothers for one bride, we have to say we don’t know how the Father will untangle that one. Not to worry: as for the dead rising again, Jesus turns to Moses in the passage about the bush (Mark 12:26, NJB). He reminds the Sadducees (and us) that God told Moses, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. That might mean that God was alive when Abraham lived and God was still alive when Isaac lived and then Jacob, too. But that’s not what Jesus means.

Jesus means that the patriarchs are alive right now. He is God, not of the dead, but of the living (Mark 12:27, NJB). That trio are still alive. When each of them died, he escaped the limit of time. Through that door, they started to live now, no yesterday and no tomorrow, just now. For God is not limited by time; in God everything is now. Abraham and Isaac and Jacob are still alive, not bare souls without flesh; they are not like angels in an airy existence. They are alive as themselves, enfleshed spirits, enspirited flesh—head, heart, and hands. For “after death the righteous will live for ever with the risen Christ,” and they will come with Jesus and all the angels and other saints for the Parousia, the Last Judgment.147

There is a lot we do not know about that Last Judgment and life after death. The Church now teaches that God has revealed the resurrection of the body only gradually, step by step.148 In my experience, God has not completed the revelation. The Catechism admits what troubles everyone’s mind: “But how can we believe that this body, so clearly mortal, could rise to everlasting life?”149

The response has to be that living this truth is a supernatural gift from God. None of us knows how we are so sure of this resurrection. I know only that I am sure. Jesus told us, I am the resurrection, and when I accepted him, I embraced the Resurrection. The Catechism says it: “Christ will raise us up ‘on the last day’; but it is also true that, in a certain way, we have already risen with Christ.”150 As St. Paul told the Romans, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life (Rom. 6:4).

Well, maybe that’s a little help. If I have already risen in Christ and walk on my own feet in newness of life, why would I exist only as a ghost after death, as the Greeks were sure they would? It is true that in that coming event of the Parousia, we also will be revealed with him in glory (Col. 3:4). But in that lapse between the time I go through my death and when the end-time comes for everyone on earth—God is always my God, still the God of the living, not of the dead.

So mature discernment yields a joyful thought: my end-time comes when my time here is done.

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