A Homily for the Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Wisdom 6:12-16 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 Matthew 25:1-13

You will stand before the face of God. 

Hard to imagine, but not because it is only a belief.

Beliefs are not alone in being opaque to picturing. Even the certain can be a challenge to comprehend. Consider the vastness of space or the age of the earth. 

We share with unbelievers the knowledge that we will die, but we cannot picture our own deaths. As Freud pointed out, the eyes of our imaginations hover over our bodies rather than shut themselves.

St. John Henry Newman insisted that we try to imagine what we know is coming, even though we know no more than that. 

We are destined to come before Him; nay, and to come before Him in judgement…One by one we shall have to endure His holy and searching eye. At present we are in a world of shadows. What we see is not substantial. Suddenly it will be rent in twain and vanish away, and our Maker will appear. And then, I say, that first appearance will be nothing less than a personal intercourse between the Creator and every creature. He will look upon us, while we look upon him (Plain and Parochial Sermons, Vol. 5, (1840), Sermon 1, preached in Advent).

There have always been those who suggest that living a good life, without the aid of religion, should be enough. Is this not what God most desires? Why must they come to church, receive the sacraments?

Newman responded:

I answer, they must do so, first of all and especially, because God tells them so to do. But besides this, I observe their state of being. They are not to be here for ever. Direct intercourse with God on their part now, prayer and the like, may be necessary to their meeting Him suitably hereafter: and direct intercourse on His part with them, or what we call sacramental communion, may be necessary in some incomprehensible way, even for preparing their very nature to bear the sight of Him.

Newman was preaching near the end of the year, when nature was dying and thoughts of closure came more easily to mind, especially for those in the autumn or winter of life. He told his congregation what they were really doing that Sunday morning was readying themselves for the Lord. “Let us then take this view of religious service; it is ‘going out to meet the Bridegroom,’ who, if not seen ‘in His beauty,’ will appear in consuming fire.” 

Worship prepares us for heaven. That does not seem immediately apparent, and if we do not particularly enjoy worship, it can be a disorienting, discouraging thought. 

The notion should challenge us, because it assails the idea that worship exists primarily to entertain and to educate. Those who preach the primacy of grace should apply the same to adoration.

Worship is not our work. It is God’s. 

Every Eucharist should school us in the triumph of grace because every sacrament simply is sola gratia, grace alone. We do not discover God; we do not even comprehend God. Instead, God lovingly pours out his presence upon us.

We live in a gnostic age. Like the ancient heresy of that name, we seek to make God one more concept we control. The Eucharist, like contemplative prayer itself, reveals the opposite: We do not master; we receive.

We do not gather to call Christ to mind. He summons us into his presence, where saints and angels convene. We stand when the Gospel is read because we believe that Christ himself addresses us, readies his ranks. “And by psalm and sacred song, by confession and praise, I learn my part,” Newman says. 

The word “sacrament” means mystery. In all of them, God is mysteriously present to us. In these earthly, modest mysteries, God, the fullness of wisdom,

makes her own rounds, seeking those worthy of her,
and graciously appears to them in the ways,
and meets them with all solicitude (Wis 12:16).

Eucharist is not our work. It is his. Something Christ began in the upper room, consummated on Calvary and brought to triumph in a cave is being wrought in us as the ages, our own and the world’s, pass. 

In worship, we go out to meet the Bridegroom. Our work is only to prepare ourselves. We must accept that when it comes to heaven, the fullness of our desires, we can do no more than open our hearts. 

Let Newman’s gorgeous Victorian prose have the last word, readying us for the coming of the Bridegroom. He tells us to look for the dawn in the dusk of what we are about to do.

A thick black veil is spread between this world and the next. We mortal men range up and down it, to and fro, and see nothing. There is no access through it into the next world. In the Gospel this veil is not removed; it remains, but every now and then marvelous disclosures are made to us of what is behind it. At times we seem to catch a glimpse of a Form which we shall hereafter see face to face. We approach, and in spite of the darkness, our hands, or our head, or our brow, or our lips become, as it were, sensible of the contact of something more than earthly. We know not where we are, but we have been bathing in water, and a voice tells us that it is blood. Or we have a mark signed upon our foreheads, and it spake of Calvary. Or we recollect a hand laid upon our heads, and surely it had the print of nails in it, and resembled His who with a touch gave sight to the blind and raised the dead. Or we have been eating and drinking; and it was not a dream surely, that One fed us from His wounded side, and renewed our nature by the heavenly meat He gave. Thus in many ways He, who is Judge to us, prepares us to be judged,—He, who is to glorify us, prepares us to be glorified, that He may not take us unawares; but that when the voice of the Archangel sounds, and we are called to meet the Bridegroom, we may be ready. 

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.