"We are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed."

Wednesday, 3/16/16

In my homily yesterday I said that I Googled the question: “Does each of us have the moral dty to seek the truth?

I couldn’t find were that duty is inscribed, but I feel that it is written into our natures which are made in the image and likeness of God. In today’s Gospel Jesus lets us know that we are born with a need to know the truth. He says, “You will be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

With my health slipping since my eighty-eighth birthday, I have been anxious to know the truth about our afterlife. When my dad was this age, and he could no longer see the cards for poker or bridge, he became curious about heaven, so he asked his priest-son who surely should have known: “Tom, what Is heaven really like?”

I gave him the Bible’s clearest answer to that question. It comes in Chapter Three, verse 2 of the First Letter of John. “We are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed.”

Of course, in Sunday sermons and funeral sermons you can get sweet surmises about how your uncle John is fishing up there, and your Aunt Kate finds she can dance better than ever.

But, if we are looking for truth, we must go to the Bible. Christ, in his becoming man elevated our mankind to became part of him. In our Baptisms we are made one with him “who is yesterday, today, and the same forever.”