And so my life is good

Thirty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C

One of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s greatest magisterial masterpieces is undoubtedly his second encyclical on the theological virtue of hope, Spes Salvi. It is unfortunate that this document did not quite capture the attention of the media. Aware that there are many menus of ‘hope’ presented to us in the world of today, Benedict’s desire, was to express that hope upon which men and women could trustingly rely. This is the hope that has God as its foundation, for, as Saint Paul makes plain (Eph 2:12), without God there is no hope - no future but darkness.

While Benedict’s lyrical theological waxing ranges from ancient to modern philosophy on the nature of hope, it is the down-to-earth Sudanese slave turned Canossian Sister, St Josephine Bakhita that he proposes as a visible and realistic model of hope. The amazing life story of St Josephine Bakhita is indeed a powerful story of hope. She was born around 1869 in Darfur in Sudan. At the age of nine, she was kidnapped by slave-traders, beaten till she bled, and sold five times in the slave-markets of Sudan. Eventually she found herself working as a slave for the mother and the wife of a general, and there she was flogged every day till she bled; as a result of this, she bore 144 scars throughout her life. Finally, in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul, who returned to Italy. Here, after the terrifying “masters” who had owned her up to that point, Bakhita came to know a totally different kind of “master” – it was the living God, the God of Jesus Christ. This new “master,” the Lord of all lords, unlike her previous masters who despised and maltreated her, this Lord and Master is good, in fact, goodness in person, a Master who loved her.

Before this discovery, Josephine had no hope for freedom, no hope for living, she merely struggled to survive. But in discovering this new “master”, Benedict writes, “now she had “hope” —no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: “I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.” Through the knowledge of this hope she was “redeemed”, no longer a slave, but a free child of God.” And so Benedict argues that only love can free us from the prison of history.

Yet the creativity of Spes Salvi is not in its treatment of love but justice. Our hope for something more, something beyond this world and across the threshold of death, is not only a desire for a love beyond limits, but also a desire for a limit to evil, a desire for justice. Our hope demands the triumph of justice, which plainly does not prevail in this world. According to Benedict, the strongest argument for eternal life is not that we might love forever, but that in eternity, justice might be wrought for those who were denied it here in their lifetime.

“God is justice and creates justice,” Benedict writes. “This is our consolation and our hope. And in his justice there is also grace… Grace does not cancel out justice. It does not make wrong into right. It is not a sponge which wipes everything away, so that whatever someone has done on earth ends up being of equal value.” We may not experience justice in this life, but in the life of the resurrection, we will not be denied justice by the God who loves us.

This was the conviction of the seven brothers we read about in the first reading, who endured torture and finally martyrdom at the hands of a tyrant. “Ours is the better choice, to meet death at men’s hands, relying on God’s promise that we shall be raised up by him.” To the astonishment of their tormentors, these brothers endured torture, flogging, bodily mutilation (hacking of limbs), because of their firm hope in the resurrection. That is why the martyrdom of the seven brothers is significant not just because it displayed their courage, but because as they went to their deaths they articulated clearly, for the first time in the Old Testament, their faith and hope in the resurrection of the body. “Resurrection” is not simply death from another viewpoint; it is the reversal of death, its cancellation, the destruction of its power. 

The resurrection of the body is central both to our understanding of the person of Christ and our understanding of ourselves. So central was the resurrection of the Body to St Paul (1 Cor 14) that he declared, that without such faith in the resurrection, we are of all people the most to be pitied: “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” The Maccabean martyrs were fearless in the face of death because they firmly believed that death was not the end of the humanity entrusted to them at birth and that God would embrace and raise up the life that they had known in this life. The third of the martyred sons proclaimed this belief as he faced fearful mutilation. “It was heaven that gave me these limbs; for the sake of His laws I disdain them; from Him I hope to receive them again.”

While we cannot imagine our own resurrection in Christ, one thing is clear: we shall not experience life in Christ as disembodied spirits. There will be no violent disruption between the life that we have lived and the life that we shall experience in the fullness of Christ’s resurrection. All that we had lost, all that we had experienced as defective, will be restored to us in greater measure; what burdensome earthly trial we experience now, will be worth it, for the life of the resurrection will exceed our wildest dreams. That is our certain hope.

It is against this background that we should understand the clash between the Lord and the Sadducees concerning the resurrection. The Sadducees, while they believed in a life after death, did not believe in a bodily resurrection and used a hypothetical situation of a woman married to seven brothers, to show up how ridiculous this belief is. But our Lord refused to be trapped in the absurdities proposed by the Sadducees. He simply asserted that the resurrection, while a continuation of the life into which we were born, shall be lived in a way beyond our imagining. Marriage and generation which are necessary if our species is to survive, will have no meaning for those who will never die again. God is not a God of the dead, He is not a God of corpses but of the living. If we live in Him, we are all alive in Him.

Hope is not wishful thinking nor is it just theoretical. The resurrection of Christ brings hope. Our resurrection in Him brings hope. Such hope is the meaning of human life. It is balm to the wounded soul, it is fuel for the exhausted Christian, it is consolation to the one who has suffered much. More than ever, our society needs a big supply of hope today because hopelessness and despair are everywhere. Hope cannot be manufactured nor is it found in false optimism. Only in the resurrected life shared with God will we find true hope. There is hope that mistakes and sins can be forgiven. There is hope that we can have joy and peace in the midst of the despair of this age. There is hope that Christ is coming soon to right every wrong, to vindicate the innocent and call the wicked to account for their wrong doings. There is hope that those who have died will be raised from the dead and suffer death no more. There is hope that someday there will come a new heaven and a new earth, and that the Kingdom of God will reign and triumph. Our hope is not in our own ability, or in our goodness, or in our physical strength. Our hope is instilled in us by the resurrection of Christ, the One who has defeated death and led its captives to freedom. Knowing this, we can say with St Josephine Bakhita, “I am definitely loved and whatever happens to me – I am awaited by this love. And so my life is good!”