Thinking at Eastertime about Heaven

 

Thinking at Eastertime about Heaven

By Fr. Andrew Hofer, O.P.

When did you last think deeply about heaven? Easter is an especially apt time to do so. Let’s think about what, if we get there, we will do. It’s not sleeping. It’s being fully alive.

When Saint Augustine preaches on Psalm 148, a great psalm of praise, he says that Lent reflects our life here on earth, but Easter anticipates our life in heaven. What will we be doing in heaven? Praising God. That’s why the Church sings out Alleluia, praise the Lord, endlessly in the Easter season. Easter is full of praise for God.

C.S. Lewis once likened praise to “inner health made audible.” Praise lets others know what good you have focused on. Don’t you want to tell someone else about a great experience that you recently enjoyed? What if the great experience is precisely about what someone else did for you and with you? The act of thankful praise completes our enjoyment. Those who have a robust soul praise most; they can praise even small goods because they recognize them as good. Their souls are healthy. Those who have a weak soul praise least; they nitpick and criticize even great persons and wonderfully good things. Their souls are sickly.

Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. This is not a little matter; it changes everything. His resurrection inaugurates the new heavens and the new earth. The Lord did this for you and me. He did this with you and with me. He did this for us—as “for us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven.” For us, he suffered, died, and rose from the dead. He did this with us—as he took upon himself our humanity so that we may be joined to him. Think of Christ as the Head of the Body, which is the Church. A head is not separate from the body, but acts with the body. With us, he suffered, died, and rose from the dead.

Our glorification of God in heaven comes with our being glorified in Christ, raised from the dead for us and with us. For us to go to heaven, God must recognize something in us praiseworthy. We ask that God recognize in us the image of his only begotten Son, our Head, who came to serve and not to be served. We want to hear those blessed words, “Well done, my good and faithful servant” (Matt 25:21, 23) from the one we know as our good and faithful master.

During this life on earth, we don’t see our Master; he is hidden. At last, in heaven, when he appears to us, “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). In this beatific vision of God, we will never tire of loving praise, as we will be fully alive. Our fulfillment, our rest, will be in an overflow of love and praise for the one who has loved and praised us.

At the end of his great and arduous City of God in its 22 books, Saint Augustine writes of heaven: “There we shall be free and see, we shall see and love, we shall love and praise.” Seeing God in the communion of the angels and saints, we shall indeed be free from all anxiety and restlessness. From that rest in freedom, we shall see clearly the One who is all good and deserving of all our love. In rapturous love, we shall ring out everlasting praise.

During this Easter season, treat your soul to think deeply about heavenly praise. Alleluia!

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Photo: Fra Angelico — “Resurrection of Christ and Women at the Tomb”

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