32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C

Mass Readings for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C

• First Reading – 2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14: “It is my choice to die at the hands of men with the hope God gives of being raised up by him; but for you, there will be no resurrection to life.”
• Responsorial Psalm – Psalm 17: “Lord, when your glory appears, my joy will be full.”
• Second Reading – 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5: “May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who has loved us and given us everlasting encouragement and good hope through his grace, encourage your hearts and strengthen them in every good deed and word.”
• Gospel – Luke 20:27-38: “They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise.”

Themes for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C

The readings for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C ask us how far we are willing to go in practicing our faith and also ask us to consider what the next life will be like. In the first reading a mother and her sons endure torture and death rather than violate the law. The psalm sings ” Lord, when your glory appears, my joy will be full.” In the second reading Paul prays that we may have the endurance of Christ. In the gospel Jesus answers a question about the resurrection.

• The Resurrection
• Heaven
• Being faithful in times of trial
• Endurance in the spiritual life

See the Homilies and Reflections section and the More Thoughts section for further expansion on these readings and some reflection questions for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C.

Are There Pets In Heaven?

Think about what heaven will be like and who and what might be there. Do I need my dog or cat in heaven in order to be happy?

What Is the Paschal Mystery?

The Paschal Mystery is God’s plan for the salvation of mankind, as fulfilled in the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ has shown us that death does not have the final word.

Guide Me to Heaven Game

Guide Me to Heaven is a game which helps youth understand the importance of clear instructions and helping each other stay on the right path. It goes well with a meeting focused on friends or the teaching of the Church.

The Reality of Life After Death

From Bishop Robert Barron. “Friends, our first reading and our Gospel for this weekend have a special resonance for our time because they both speak clearly about life after death. Our dominant secularist or materialist ideology says that matter in motion is all there is; the world came into being, and eventually it will pass out of being. On the other hand, an awful lot of Christians hold to something more Platonic than biblical, thinking of the afterlife as the soul escaping from the body to a purely spiritual place called heaven. But the biblical hope is for the resurrection of the body.”

To Rise Again

From Scott Hahn. “With their riddle about seven brothers and a childless widow, the Sadducees in today’s Gospel mock the faith for which seven brothers and their mother die in the First Reading. The Sadducees don’t believe in the resurrection because they can’t find it literally taught in the Scriptures. To ridicule this belief they fix on a law that requires a woman to marry her husband’s brother if he should die without leaving an heir.” Continue Reading.

The Hope of Heaven

Jeff Cavins encourages us to believe in the resurrection of the dead and live with the hope of heaven.

To God, All People Are Alive

From Fr. Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation. There are two major factions: the Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection and the Pharisees who did. In this case, Jesus agrees with the Pharisees, even though he disagrees with them on some other matters. Everyone who gets some parts right and some parts wrong! Resurrection is not an occasional event for worthy people. Resurrection is the universal pattern of all of creation. Life. Death. Life. God shows this to us through the natural world.

Eternal Life

Also from Bishop Barron. “Today’s Gospel reading tells us about the Sadducees trying to lead Jesus into a ridiculous conclusion. To them the Jewish teaching on marriage seems irrational. However, Jesus shows us that not everything that appears cloudy to our intellect is sub-rational. Rather, some times it may be supra-rational – beyond the finite intellect – making it rational, but the rationality of another dimension. The claims of Faith may not be comprehensible to our intellects now, but we believe that they will once we are in his eternal presence.”

The Resurrection of the Body

From Bishop Robert Barron. “Both our first reading and Gospel for today present the distinctively Biblical view of what happens to us after we die. We do not so much escape from the body as begin to live in a transformed and transfigured body, what Paul calls a ‘spiritual body.’”

The Martyrs and a Higher World

Also from Bishop Barron. “We can talk about heaven, we can speculate about it, we can write learned treatises about it, and we can hope for it. But up and down the centuries, it is the martyrs—from the ancient Maccabees to the Christians slain by ISIS—that most vividly witness to the promise of heaven. They literally bet their lives on it.”