Sunday, Nov. 6, is the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C). Mass Readings: 2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14; Psalm 17:1, 5-6, 8, 15; 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5; Luke 20:27-38 or 20:27, 34-38.

The Church year is coming to a close. The days are getting short, and the nights are getting long and cold. The things of this earth are caught in an endless cycle of disappointment and death — the world’s promises all fade away and the things around us all decay.

At such a moment, we are in dire need of “everlasting encouragement” — and the readings at Mass supply it.

The Gospel points to an “escape hatch” from the cycle of disappointment and death.

It all starts when a group of Sadducees try to show Jesus the absurdity of the doctrine of the Resurrection. They tell a story about a woman who is widowed by, and remarried to, a series of seven brothers. “Now, at the resurrection, whose wife will that woman be?” they ask.

Jesus answers by pointing to the “everlasting encouragement” of a new kind of hope.

“Those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage,” he says. They have something greater: “They can no longer die. They are like angels, and they are the children of God.”

He challenges the Sadducees not to focus so much on whether earthly life will continue in heaven, but to see how earthly limitations will cease.

Heaven will be a place where there is no disappointment and no decay. On earth, we find the unconditional love we long for in a family. In heaven, we will find it in its pure form, in God.

This means a lot, as the first reading, from Second Maccabees, makes clear. It tells the story of the brave Jewish brothers who refuse to eat pork in violation of God’s law.

One of the brothers succinctly spells out the implications of hope in the resurrection.

Speaking of his hands he says, “It was from heaven that I received these; for the sake of his laws, I disdain them; from him, I hope to receive them again.”

Our bodies came from God; anything they offer apart from him is worthless; and if we lose them, he can provide them again.

It is Paul in the second reading that calls this “everlasting encouragement” when it is connected to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who defeated death once and for all. “The Lord is faithful; he will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one,” he says. He gives us “the endurance of Christ.”

So as fall wears on to winter and as the earth’s pleasures fade and pass away, it is true that the life we know here on earth will not survive.

But it is also true that a far greater life awaits us. “Lord, when your glory appears, my joy will be full,” we pray in the Psalm. “Jesus Christ is the firstborn of the dead; to him be glory and power, forever and ever,” we pray before the Gospel.

Tom Hoopes is writer

in residence at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas,

and the author of What Pope Francis Really Said

(2016, Servant).