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A reflection for the fifth Sunday of Easter
Readings: Acts 14:21-27 Revelation 21:1-5A John 13:31-33a, 34-35
What does paradise look like? Some would say no one knows, even if it’s a place, like Narnia, where the imagination of CS Lewis once traveled, in a story called The big divorce (1945). Much like the plot of the television series “Lost” (2004-10), a group of travelers are dropped off at a place they don’t know, although these characters arrive via an otherworldly bus, not a plane crash.
This is the narrator’s first contact with this new land. Familiar, but something has changed; his companions appear to be ghosts.
It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of a different substance, so much stronger than the things of our country that men were ghosts in comparison. Moved by a sudden thought, I leaned over and tried to pick a daisy growing at my feet. The rod did not break. I tried to twist it, but it wouldn’t twist. I tugged until the sweat came off my hands. The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron, but like diamond. There was a leaf, a tender young beech leaf, lying in the grass nearby. I tried to pick up the leaf: my heart almost cracked with the effort, and I think I just picked it up. But I had to give up right away; it was heavier than a sack of coal. As I stood up, catching my breath with great gasps and looking at the daisy, I noticed that I could see the grass not only between my feet but through them. I was also a ghost. Who will give me words to express the terror of this discovery? “God, I thought, I’m in it this time.”
Speaking of troubles, Saint Paul said to the congregation of the church at Antioch,
We need to go through many hardships.
enter the kingdom of God (Acts 14:22).
A bromide? Paul had been through a lot on his first mission. He had once been proclaimed a god and twice stoned. He didn’t utter platitudes.
When a pastor is not repairing buildings, an inordinately time-consuming activity, he is doing what he can to repair lives. Sometimes I feel like the general of a giant, sad retreating army: This one is dead. These two are dying. They are quite sick. This one is so worried about his child. This one has the impression that her husband has abandoned her when he has never left the house.
And now, thanks to pastoral technology, I receive daily text messages and email updates, begging me to pray. No complaints. It is my calling. And, like so many things I do in my vocation, it is the vocation of all the baptized.
“It is necessary for us to undergo many trials to enter the kingdom of God.” Sometimes when a person’s faith is strong enough, I can tell them that, and they can hear it. They are not lost souls. They may not, in the present moment, know the way, but they know where they are going. Heaven is their home. These are the difficulties of the path.
It is faith that prepares us for heaven. And what is faith? Stubbornly seeing a purpose in this life – stubbornly because sometimes it takes great effort – that others cannot see.
When faith is weak, I have less to say. There is less I can say. And the suffering do not ask me much, if not to listen patiently to talk about their sorrows. I also do it because it is my vocation: to listen and bleat the lambs.
No judgement, at least right now, from me, as my faith has also been both strong and weak. I am brave and I bleat. So I just do what I can to strengthen the faith: theirs and mine.
CS Lewis’ story suggests that not everyone is ready for heaven. Some get there like ghosts. The sky itself is quite real. Indeed, it is so strong that they cannot even walk on its grass without great effort. As people – our word would be “souls” – they are just too insubstantial for heaven.
It is faith that prepares us for heaven. And what is faith? Stubbornly seeing a purpose in this life – stubbornly because sometimes it takes great effort – that others cannot see.
The genius of CS Lewis is to suggest that if we cannot see the glory of God in this vale of tears, we will struggle to see it in the life to come.
Mel Gibson will always be a genius to me because in his film, “The Passion of the Christ” (2004), a wounded Jesus, fallen under his cross, painfully gets up and sputters to his mother a line that the risen Christ proclaims in the Book of the Resurrection. “Behold, Mother, I make all things new” (21:5). How hard it was to believe, at that moment, that he was doing just that!
Except for the woman Christ spoke to, we are all a mixture of sinner and saint. Sometimes we suffer and we can do no more than blame ourselves and question God. It’s the sinner in us. The saint sees the same thing but receives the grace, like Christ on the eve of his death, to see the glory of God.
Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in him (Jn 13:31).
The genius of CS Lewis is to suggest that if we cannot see the glory of God in this vale of tears, we will struggle to see it in the life to come. Without God’s purifying and preparing mercy, heaven will simply be too much for us.
In the dark night before Calvary, Christ saw the glory of his Father. But how are we, weak as we are, supposed to do this? How are we supposed to trust that “it is necessary for us to undergo many trials to enter the kingdom of God”? After all, no one has seen paradise and come back to tell us about it.
But, you see, it is not true! Someone has gone before us and has come back to tell us about the life to come. Christ! And he didn’t leave us to fend for ourselves. The mystery we call the church comes down to this: one of us strengthening the other in Christ.
As I have loved you, you too must love one another.
This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples,
if you have love for one another (Jn 13:34-35).
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