Tuesday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time
This past Saturday I went to the funeral of the wife of a doctor I work with at the hospital. I had only met his wife once in our short conversation I learned she is an incredibly faithful disciple. Her first cousin the Patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox could not be there because he was at a Coptic Orthodox Synod of Bishops. In his message to the faithful gathered to celebrate her life he said, my cousin who I love gave her all to live a ‘faith filled in the way she talks, in the way she speaks and in the way she lives her life.’ His sentiments consoled the family that she was alive with Christ.
Certainly, we are all alive with Christ in both this world and the next, but sometimes I hear people of faith talking about the dying process and death itself as if Satan was causing it. Today’s scriptures help us put it into perspective. They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; … and their going forth from us, utter destruction. They are in peace for the souls of the just are in the hands of God. As Christians we believe Christ destroyed the power of death. We believe in Life after Life. While foolish to some this is our belief.
We believe that God’s grace and mercy are with his holy ones. The question is who are his holy ones? The gospel tells us that do what the Lord commands, or have done what they were obliged to do are the servants of God. In other words we must give our all to radical discipleship. We must live every moment both at home and work and everywhere in between with desire to please the Lord in the ways we think, talk, and act. When we do this, we will draw those around toward Jesus Christ, from whom we have gained Life after life.
- Deacon Michael Montgomery