Fr Eugene Lobo, SJ –
Thirty Second Sunday of the Year November 06, 2022
Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14; 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5; Luke 20:27-38
Christian belief in immortality is unique and special. The Gospel tells us of the Good News of the fullness of life in this age and of the resurrection in the age to come. For us death is a door that opens us to full of surprises and not a wall that blinds us from every possible vision. Our resurrection gives us the hope that we will be with God fully alive and active fulfilling the call that God has given us. In the first reading of today, we have the story of the martyrdom of seven brothers who urged by their mother to remain faithful to God with the hope that they will enjoy the glory of the resurrection to come. In the Gospel, Jesus responds to a challenge from the Sadducees by teaching that resurrection life is far different from anything experienced on earth. The Sadducees as a group which did not believe in the resurrection and they confront Jesus tells them the meaning of resurrection. A resurrected person would be alive with God praising and thanking him and experiencing life totally different from the earthly life.
Today’s First Reading taken from the second book of Maccabees tells us that God’s servants remain loyal even in the face of death as they know that they will be with God. Judas Maccabeus was the key figure in the struggle to preserve the traditions of God’s chosen people. Here we have the story of the martyrdom of the mother and her seven sons. Each one of them was willing to die for the Law of Moses because they believed in afterlife and that at the last trumpet, the King of the universe would raise them up to everlasting life. They were ready to die rather than sin, trusting in the Lord God to raise them up again with their bodies being fully restored. Theirs was an incredible faith displayed in the face of death and torture. Each son seems to proclaim more eloquently than the one before him faith in God and conviction of life after death.
Today’s Second Reading from the Second Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians opens our eyes to the fact that the Lord strengthens our hearts in every good work and word. Paul prays that Jesus and his loving Father will give the Thessalonians the help they need to be courageous and hopeful in living up to the Gospel and proclaiming it to others. We learn that through prayer, the word and the work of the Lord that is manifested through us rapidly spreads, and in this way God is glorified everywhere. Through our prayers for each other, we faithful children of God are rescued from the wicked and evil people. Paul tells them that the Lord is faithful, strengthening and guarding them against the evil one. To protect all, God placed His Holy Spirit within each and every one of us so that those baptized may follow His statutes and keep His ordinances and obey them.
In today’s Gospel Jesus is challenged by a group of Sadducees concerning the resurrection of the dead. Just before this, he had been challenged by their opponents, the Pharisees, and Scribes, who tried to force Jesus into an untenable position by asking him if taxes should be paid to Caesar or not. Jesus had dealt effectively with them and reduced them to silence. The Sadducees were looked down on by the Pharisees. They were seen as materialistic opportunists who tried to keep on the right side of the Roman authorities. The Sadducees seem to have been a Jewish group closely aligned with the aristocratic and priestly classes. They were all very wealthy, nearly all were priests, they were the governing class, they accepted only the written law of the Old Testament, they particularly stressed the Law of Moses, they invested nothing in the prophetic books, they did not believe in the resurrection from the dead, angels or spirits. They did not believe in the coming of a Messiah. The Sadducees wanted a very simple and structured predictable life. They wanted things neat and orderly. They wanted no surprises and left nothing left to speculation.
The Gospel reading gives us the fictitious story of seven brothers marrying one woman and their relation with each other in the other life. Their question in the Gospel is certainly insincere and the near-impossible example they use regarding the seven brothers is purposely meant to sound silly in order to ridicule a belief in the resurrection. The practice of Levirate marriage of OT was based on a presupposition that a person lives on in his or her descendants and in their memory. It was considered important to protect property rights. To assure that a person would have descendants to carry on the family memory, it was understood that if a man died without children, the next brother was obligated to take the deceased brother’s wife and have children by her. Legally the child would be considered the offspring of the deceased brother and his wife.
Jesus does not address the Sadducees’ question directly. Instead, he makes the point that the resurrected life is totally different from any kind of life experienced on earth, including married life. In other words, the Sadducees’ example and the question does not pertain to all to what the resurrection life is. Resurrection life refers to a radical new order of life that cannot be compared with anything on earth. Jesus supports his understanding of the doctrine of the resurrection by proclaiming that God is God not of the dead but of the living. This would imply that somehow the Patriarchs must be alive to God or in God. In the first part of his answer, Jesus gives them a firm and deeper understanding of the nature of the resurrected life. Jesus tells them that Heaven will be quite different and in our afterlife we too will be quite different.
Again Jesus tells them that in this physical world, God has instituted marriage to fulfil his work of creation as he creates humanity in his image and likeness. But once in Heaven, there will be the fulfilment of creation and thus there is no need of marriage. The resurrected life is not the kind of life we have here but a life fulfilled with our closeness to God. Jesus clearly affirms that those raised from the dead are no longer liable to death. Beside the joy of the beatific vision of God, a person can rest assured that there will be no death any further and this happiness and joy will never end. In eternal life, those who have persevered to the end, shall all enjoy the fullness of life as it was meant to be enjoyed from the beginning of creation.
Since Sadducees held only the Law of Moses as their guide, Jesus returns to that, citing the remarkable incident of Moses encountering God in the burning bush. God calling out to Moses from the burning bush identifies himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. When Moses did encounter God, these Patriarchs were dead and gone. But we have the God who is God of the living persons and cannot be God of those dead. Yet God says to Moses that he is the God of those persons. That meant for certain that those persons were not dead in the divine sense but were still living. The creative power of God brings life after death. This argument put the Sadducees to silence and indeed Jesus had met them on their own ground and won the battle.
Jesus in his proper reply tells the people that the children of this world take wives and husbands, but those who are judged worthy of a place in the other world and in the resurrection from the dead do not marry because they can no longer die, for they are the same as the angels, and being children of the resurrection they are children of God. This is indeed a new life that is attained in Jesus. The presence of Jesus is the knowledge of the resurrection. To attain this Resurrection, we have to be with Jesus and experience his life. He tells us that whoever wishes to come after him must deny himself, take up his cross and follow him. Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for his sake and that of the gospel will save it. This was very much a practical and sincere norm of life. In its message, the gospel tells us that our Christian life is based, first, on the firm hope that one day we will rise again and be perfectly united with the One from whom all things come and to whom all things are destined to return.
One day a young lady was driving along with her father. They came upon a storm, and the young lady asked her father, what should I do?” He said, “Keep driving”. Cars began to pull over to the side, the storm was getting worse. What should I do?” The young lady asked? “Keep driving,” her father replied. On up a few feet, she noticed that eighteen-wheelers were also pulling over. She told her dad, “I must pull over, I can barely see ahead. It is terrible, and everyone is pulling over!” Her father told her, “Don’t give up, just keep driving!” Now the storm was terrible, but she never stopped driving, and soon she could see a little more clearly. After a couple of miles, she was again on dry land, and the sun came out. Her father said, “Now you can pull over and get out.” She said, “But why now?” He said “When you get out, look back at all the people that gave up and are still in the storm. Because you never gave up your storm is now over.