Knights of Columbus Memorial Mass
17th Week in Ordinary Time
Orlando, Florida
August 3, 2023
More Than a Good and Wholesome Thing
Like every Mass, today’s Eucharistic Liturgy is God’s gift to us. But this Mass, offered for brother knights, family members, and friends of the Order who have died this past year – is also a wonderful act of fraternal charity. We read in the 2nd Book of Maccabees that it is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead. Yet, this Mass is more than that; it is an act of unsurpassed love. For we now offer for them the one sacrifice of Christ by which sin is forgiven and hope of everlasting life shines forth.
So it is, that with hearts full of hope, we commend our beloved dead to the Lord, those sisters and brothers of ours who have gone before us in faith. They have had their definitive meeting with the Lord Jesus as Savior and Judge. They have given an accounting of their lives before the Throne of Grace, as will we all. They await, as do we, for the Lord to come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. And let’s be clear: the Church’s teaching on the particular judgment at the end of life and the general judgment at the end of time is not a scare tactic. This truth should rather spur us on to victory and prompt us to pray with fervent hope that our beloved dead will experience the joy of seeing God face to face in heaven.
The Dragnet
And it is in light of this hope that is ours in Christ Jesus that we read anew the parable of the dragnet in the Gospel just proclaimed. What Jesus describes for us is God’s vast net that on judgment day will haul in the whole of humanity. There, on the shores of eternity, the good will be separated from the bad, those who are spiritually sound and beautiful, from those who have decayed inwardly.
In a sense, we human beings really are like fish in the sea. Like them, we share a common nature but are astonishingly varied, and each of us is a unique person, “an unrepeatable reality”. Like the fish in the sea, we dart about busily as we engage in our daily activities. The sea is like the world we live in, a world in which we can see, to be sure, but as St. Paul tells us, we see indistinctly (1 Cor 13:12), only obscurely. For in the world we inhabit, the true state of affairs often is not clear. As long as we are moving about underwater, so to speak, in the murkiness of daily life, it is not always evident who and what is sound or unsound, and, unlike God, we often judge by appearances.
But then, on a day no one expects, comes the dragnet, the day of judgment. The angels of God will haul each of us ashore, into the clear light of eternity, Once ashore, the process of sorting begins. Our Redeemer and Judge will respect the variety and individuality of us, his creation, but he will also look to see if we have fulfilled the potential he endowed us with – not only the natural gifts, but indeed the abundance of his grace. For it is not only our variety and individuality that will count, but also our worth, a worth measured not in money, power, or pleasure but rather in the degree to which we have participated in and reflected God’s own life, and the degree to which we have contributed to the building up of his Kingdom. This is what makes us beautiful in God’s eyes.
The Standard
As we contemplate both the particular and the general judgment, we naturally ask by what precise standard we will be judged. The answer, of course, is the humanity of Christ, he who reveals us to ourselves, the One whom the earliest Christians referred to as “Ichthys”, the Greek word for fish… In the Roman catacombs, we find the symbol of a fish to represent Christ, the One who multiplied the loaves and fishes, the One who gave himself as food in the Eucharist. This symbol is how persecuted Christians could tell who was a believer and who was not.
If, while on earth, we are like fish darting about the sea, we must aspire in God’s grace to become good, sound, and beautiful – like the One Ichthys, like the Christ who was poor in spirit, meek and humble, pure of heart, all-holy, grieved by sin, persecuted to the point of death, beloved in his Father’s eyes. In other words, by the very choices we make of action and attitude, we foreshadow the choice that God will make in our regard on the day of judgment. If in his grace, we continually strive to chose as Christ would chose, then the Father will see and love in us what he sees and loves in Christ. And let us again be clear: God wants everyone to be saved, and has gone to the greatest lengths to bring that about. In the end, only we can exclude ourselves from his kingdom of grace and glory.
Though Jesus spoke in parables, the truth he teaches is not mere metaphor; it is real. And while we moderns chafe at the prospect of judgment, and indeed try to domestic God into a doddering benevolence, we should realize, you and me, that God’s judgment of us reveals the respect God has for our freedom and dignity coupled with his burning desire that we truly share in his goodness and glory.
What to Pray For
This is not to say that salvation is out of reach or that God’s mercy is less than mighty. It is to say that we should pray for our beloved dead earnestly and without presumption. We love them best when we do not presume that salvation is “in the bag” – but rather implore for them the mercy of God, the same mercy that we need. That is why offering this holy Mass for our beloved dead is an act of fraternal charity, a sharing of spiritual goods, indeed, the greatest spiritual good, the gift of Christ’s sacrificial love, his Body and Blood, offered for our salvation.
As we offer this gift of love, let us pray that our beloved dead will be found worthy to enter, not a temple made by human hands, but the heavenly temple, where Christ shines as the sun and where everyone and everything is seen in its truest form. There, may they shine like stars in the sky for all eternity. Amen.