“Again a little while”: sermon on the third Sunday after Easter

By a Dominican friar   |   7 May 2025

“A little while and now you shall not see me; and again a little while, and you shall see me.”

In the lives of the desert fathers, we read of a certain old monk who lived alone on a mountain-side. One day a young brother came to visit him and asked him why it was that he lived there alone, so far away from the other monks. The old man replied, “I too used to live in the desert with the others, but then it started to become crowded, and so I got up and came to this mountain; and finding the place peaceful I have remained here for a little while.” The young brother said to him, “How long have you been here, father?” He replied, “Seventy-two years.”

This old monk, whose name was St Sisoes, had taken to heart our Lord’s teaching in the holy gospel of this Sunday. Compared to eternity, all time is but a “little while”. That’s true both of our individual lives, and of the life of the whole Church down the centuries, as she waits for Christ to return, and bring her into the joys of eternity.

But what exactly is eternity? The word has two senses, a stricter and a looser one. Both of them surpass our imaginations; yet with the help of God we can gain a little understanding of them.

In its stricter sense, eternity belongs to God alone. It is His unchanging “now”. What does that mean, God’s unchanging now? Well, with us, no sooner do we call some time “now”, than it slips away from us into the past. For example, the words I am speaking are present to you now, but when I have stopped speaking, they will no longer be present to you; at the most, you may perhaps retain some memory of them. We must look back to the past and forward to the future, because our “now” is only a moment that is constantly disappearing.

With God, it is not so. To Him, all the events of all times are permanently spread out before His eyes. God does not have to remember the fall of man or the Virgin birth, nor does He look forward to the second coming. They are all present to Him. Although He sees that one event happens before or after another one, they are all now to Him. That is eternity in the strict sense, and it belongs only to God. 

But the word also, as I say, has also a looser sense, meaning one thing happening after another, with no end. And in that sense eternity is also for human beings, because each of us has an immortal soul. Thus, for the saints in heaven, as well as their unchanging vision of God, there will also be the experience of change. The blessed will go from one joy to another. 

How shall we speak of this, using human words? The mediaeval Dominican friar, Blessed Henry Suso, once had a vision of Heaven, in which he saw it as like a continuous and everlasting dance, in which one finds oneself now in the presence of one person, now in the presence of another. On earth, we would grow tired even of joy if it continued very long, but that is only because of the weakness of our mortal nature. But when as St Paul says, “this mortal has put on immortality”, it will be otherwise: we will become capable of joys without end.

And alas, also, in this sense, of events without end, there will be an eternity also for those whom we call the lost. The souls of the lost will go not from joy to joy but from bitterness to bitterness, and yet, strange to say, they will prefer even that to being in heaven with God.

How then are we to purchase our own eternity? Only by time. That is what makes time so precious. I think that if the saints in heaven could envy us on earth anything, it would be the power that we still possess of growing closer to God by using time well. And by each day’s twenty-four hours, all men in fact, whether they know it or not, are purchasing their own eternity.

Finally, Christ has now left this temporal and temporary world. And just as seven of His friends once passed a hard night on a ship on the sea of Galilee, so we are tossed about in this world of time. “But when the morning was come, Jesus stood on the shore” to welcome them. So may it be for us, when our night has passed and the eternal dawn breaks upon our souls.