Unintended

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/052925-thursday.cfm

Jesus will unravel for the apostles one of the great fundamental truths of Christianity: we live forever. As they go through it though, it is something so incredible to believe in that Jesus cannot teach it to them, they must see it before they can allow their hearts to believe it.

Oh, how far we have fallen. Our fall from grace has left us accustomed to death. So convinced of it that our hearts, minds and bodies are wracked with grief when someone dies, even if we believe with all of being that what Jesus tells the apostles is true. For the believer, this can even be a source of doubt: "if I really believe why am I so sad? I know they will live on forever, yet I grieve to my very core."

This life, saddled and overshadowed by death, is not what was intended for us. This is not what we were made for. The separation of us from our loved ones by the veil of death feels awful to us because we were made to love eternally. The sin that entered the world creates in us, for a time, a feeling of disconnection and loss of equilibrium that stems from the unnatural separation of our loved ones from our physical presence. The grief actually tells us something about who we are and what we are made for.

The enemy would want us to lean into a feeling that our faith has failed us in the critical moment and maybe even that eternity is not real. But our eternal nature tells us there is more to come and at the same time signals in the depth of our hearts that this death is not what we were made for. This is why Jesus tells His apostles: "you will grieve, but your grief will become joy." He was talking about His Resurrection, but He was also talking about theirs. The joy of realizing, in their bodies, the truth of who they really are will be the joy that overcomes every fear and wipes away all grief.

Thank you to Fr. Tim Deely who reminded us of this in a recent funeral homily.