EYE HATH NOT SEEN

A SERMON FOR THE 4th SUNDAY AFTER EASTER

When Our Lord told the Apostles “I go my way to him that sent me,” sorrow filled their hearts.  Their friend, their teacher, their beloved Saviour was leaving them, and they were sorrowful.  But there was no sorrow in Our Lord’s Heart:  he was returning to his Father in heaven, and his human nature was soon to share the glory and infinite bliss which his divine nature had enjoyed since all eternity.  He explained to his Apostles that it was expedient and good for him to go:  “I go,” he said, “to prepare a place for you.”  He was speaking not just to his Apostles that day, but to every one of us.  When he finally departed from this earth, it was to prepare for us a place in heaven.

We don’t think about heaven often enough.  A big reason for that is that we can’t describe very clearly what heaven is, we can’t understand how it feels to be in heaven.  For this reason, we tend to preach to you about the other place, hell, with its pains and torments numberless.  This we can understand.  We know all about pain, suffering, misery.  Because this earth is itself a vale of tears, and pain and suffering are no strangers to us.  But perfect joy?  What is that?  It is something that we can never experience in this world, for the very simple reason that this world is not perfect.  It will have an end, and so too will any of the joys we experience.  The happiness of a vacation eventually ends and we must return to work, the blissful honeymoon quickly transforms into the rigours of married life, all the pleasures we seek after are not enough to satisfy our hearts and souls.  So how we can ever understand heaven?

The answer is of course that we cannot.  If I were able to speak with the tongue of an angel I could perhaps describe to you what heaven is like, so that you could live your life with your mind constantly fixed in hope on your future home there.  But no one can explain what heaven really is.  Our understanding is too limited, and our vocabulary too poor to describe the things of the other world where all is infinite, endless, and perfect.  And very few people, even saints, have ever been given even the smallest glimpse into heaven.  One such saint, who was caught to the third heaven (the heaven above the heaven of clouds and the heaven of stars) was Saint Paul.  He was shown into the abode of God and the blessed, and when he came back to earth, what could he tell us about it?  He said: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”  The great doctor of the Church St. Augustine once took up his pen to write about heaven, and that other great saint, St. Jerome, who had recently died, appeared to him and told him:  “You do not know anything about heaven.  Eye hath not seen.  You know nothing!”

I’ve spent a good deal of time telling you that I know nothing of what I’m telling you about.  Let’s take a look at a few things that can give us a very dim idea of heaven.  When St. John the Apostle was writing about the Apocalypse, he saw the heavens open and it was revealed to him that in heaven, “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain:  for the former things are passed away.”  Imagine how happy we would be if I could tell you today that from now on there would be no pain or sorrow, nor sickness or death.  Surely we would echo the words of the Apostles at the Transfiguration and say:  “Let us stay here forever!”  And yet, this would still not be heaven.  No pain or suffering—that’s just the negative side of heaven.

Heaven is joy.  Happiness.  Our human hearts are made for happiness.  The world always tries to invent new ways of satisfying this craving of our heart for happiness.  But as St. Augustine says:  “Our heart is restless until it finds rest in God.”  Our heart is actually quite small.  I can cover my heart with the palm of my hand.  And yet is so big that the whole world, with all its pleasures, is not able to fill it and satisfy it, because it is made for God.  God’s reward for us after this world is pure joy, happiness exceeding great, infinite, eternal.  He will reward us with the words:  “Enter thou into the joy of the Lord.”  And the Lord will be our joy.  The great saints, like St. Francis, St. Theresa, were the happiest people in this world.  Happy because they knew God.  They had found a taste of that eternal joy which we all harbor within our soul.  We know it, we experience it, we taste it—but describe it we cannot.

We know a few of the joys that accompany that “joy of the Lord”.  We know, for example, that our body will be transfigured and glorious, and that we shall be the fellow-citizens of the Saints, the companions of the Angels.  We know too that we shall see our dear ones again, never more to be separated from them.  We shall behold the Blessed Mother, immaculate and full of grace, beautiful as the moon, resplendent as the sun, the most wonderful creature that ever came forth from the hands of God.  We shall see the sacred humanity of Christ—the Child we adored in the manger, the Man we wept for in his Passion and Death, his body now transfigured and glorious, sharing now the glory of his divinity.

But these are only some of the joys that accompany that “joy in the Lord”.  What then is heaven?  It is in finally seeing God “face to face”.  This is just a human expression, which means that in heaven we shall God as he is.  In heaven God will give us what is called by theologians the lumen gloriae, the “light of glory”, which enables our soul to look into the very nature of God, to penetrate into the depths of his divinity:  we shall see all mysteries hidden in God from all eternity, and all the mysteries of his love and mercy.

In heaven our faith will be transformed into knowing, our hope into possessing.  And our love?  Our love will become an eternal, never-ending love, as we gaze, face to face, into the windows of the soul of God.  That is heaven.  But alas, eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive what that means.