Maccabees 7:1-2,9-14; 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5; Luke 20:27-38
Homily Outline
- The fact of resurrection from the dead:
- John 5.25 “I tell you the truth, a time is coming...”
- John 6.40 “... I will raise him up at the last day”
- Acts 24.15 “... there will be a resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked) (see also Lk 16.24; Jn 5.28-29; Dan 12.2)
- Transformation after death:
- 1 Cor 15.42-44, 53-54 Perishable has been clothed with the imperishable (2Tim 4.18)
- Relationships are changed absolutely -There is no marriage in heaven – love is perfected – future life and relationship exceed earthly relationships – believers are adopted children of God (Gal 4.5-6, 1Jn 3.2)
- Live for attaining eternal life
- Phil 3.11 “ ...somehow, to attain tot the resurrection from the dead.”
- Tit 2.12-13 “... say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions...”
Sunday Scripture Reflections
with Frank Doyle SJ
I shall be filled, when I awake, with the sight of your glory, O Lord. (Gospel)
Responsorial psalm antiphon
Final resurrection as the goal of all living is a central concept of our Christian faith. It is very much a matter of faith and trust in God’s word as we have no proof or prior experience of such a life nor can we say very much about it. Paul puts it well when he says that “Eye has not seen nor ear heard all that God has prepared for those who love him.”
Visions of ‘heaven’
People of different faiths have tried using all kinds of material delights to describe life after death. We have often be influenced by the images in the Book of Revelation which has led us to describe ‘heaven’ as a place where we kneel on clouds, play harps and sing the praises of God all day long and every day for ever. These images are not in the long run helpful and we do better going with the author of the mystical book The Cloud of Unknowing which suggests that we only begin to know God when we realise that we do not know him nor can we know him in any full way in his life. And the same goes for the kind of life we will live face to face with him.
A challenge
In today’s Gospel Jesus is challenged by a group of Sadducees. 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
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. They included the aristocratic leaders of the Jewish community and occupied high positions, such as the High Priesthood (e.g. Annas and Caiaphas). While the Pharisees were seen as rigid upholders of the Law they were also seen, by the Sadducees, as ‘modernisers’ in their beliefs and in their interpretations of the Law.
The Sadducees, on the other hand, although they took a far more liberal approach to the observance of the Law, were conservative in their beliefs. They only accepted the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) and did not accept beliefs contained in the other books. Thus they excluded faith in the bodily resurrection of the just and in the existence of spirits and angels. (None of these beliefs is overtly contained in the Pentateuch.)
Setting a trap
Like the Pharisees, however, in the previous incident, they wanted to trap Jesus into discrediting himself. They hoped to show that belief in a future life was not only wrong but self-contradictory.
They come forward with a case which they think, from their point of view, is totally unanswerable. According to a law cited both in the book of Deuteronomy (accepted by the Sadducees) and also in the book of Ruth (which they did not accept), a brother was supposed to bring up an heir for a brother who died childless. This was to guarantee that the property would stay within the family and that the father’s name would be carried on to posterity.
Extreme example
They propose an exaggerated example of the law’s application. A man married but died childless. His brother then married the widow but he, too, died without an heir. And so all seven brothers married the same woman in succession and all died childless. The question, then, was: To which of the seven brothers was the woman the wife?
The question posed no problem to the Sadducees. They did not believe in a future life so those who had died no longer existed. But, if Jesus believes in a future life, how will he answer their question? Either he has to admit that she is the wife of all of them; in which case he is making God approve of polygamy (in this case, polyandry) or else the only rational conclusion is that there is no future resurrection.
No problem
In fact, for Jesus there is no problem at all. For in the future life he sees that people are in a completely new relationship with God and with each other. Already in this life, Jesus has taught that to be in the Kingdom is to have entered a new relationship with others. In the Kingdom people have entered a new family where all – irrespective of their origins – are our brothers and sisters.
In a striking scene where Jesus is told that his mother and brothers are looking for him, he replies, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? He looked at the people sitting around him and said, ‘Look! Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does what God wants him to do is my brother, my sister, my mother’” (Mark 3:33-35). In the life to come, too, that is the family to which we shall all belong. Relationships such as our blood family, ethnic origin, social class…will become totally irrelevant. The question of the Sadducees has absolutely no meaning.
A this-world reality
Jesus’ reply, as reported by Luke, implies that such irrelevance has already begun. “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 seems to point to a phenomenon already appearing in the early Church where people were foregoing marriage – becoming celibates – in order to free themselves for total dedication to the work of the Kingdom. These people are, as it were, a kind of sacrament of the relationships that will exist in the future and eternal Kingdom.
Turning the tables
However, in a final rebuttal to the Sadducees, Jesus uses their own weapon against them. They had used the levirate law from the Pentateuch, supposedly written by Moses, against Jesus. He now quotes from the same Pentateuch to show that Moses shows that the dead are raised to life. He takes the scene from the book of Exodus where Moses faces the burning bush. Moses asks the voice that speaks to him, “When I go to the Israelites and say to them ‘The God of your ancestors sent me to you’, they will ask me, ‘What is his name?’ So what can I tell them?” To which God replies: “’I AM who I AM. You must tell them: ‘The one who is called I AM has sent me to you.’ Tell the Israelites that I, the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, have sent you to them. This is my name forever; this is what future generations are to call me” (Exodus 3:13-15).
God of the living
As Jesus then points out, God is a God of the living and not of the dead. How can he call himself the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, if they no longer exist? The Sadducees are silenced for they cannot refute the words of the Pentateuch, which to them is the word of God.
Famous episode
The First Reading deals with another famous episode found in the book of the Maccabees. It happened in the reign of the Syrian king, Antiochus IV, a man of extreme instability and cruelty who wanted to unify his empire under a common Greek culture. Among other things, he tried to abolish Jewish practices and profaned the Temple. Not surprisingly, he met with stiff resistance and today’s passage describes a scene where a mother and her seven sons are one by one tortured and executed for refusing to renounce their faith by eating pork.
A price worth paying
The essence of the story is that there are values in life which are more precious than one’s own earthly life and are worth dying for. The sacrifice of martyrdom is seen as a worthwhile price to pay and will be rewarded by entry into a new and altogether better life. As the fourth son says: “Ours is the better choice, to meet death at men’s hands, yet relying on God’s promise that we shall be raised up by him; whereas for you there can be no resurrection, no new life.”
Our Christian life then is based, first, on the firm hope that one day we will be perfectly united with the One from whom all things come and to whom all things are destined to return. It is put so well by Paul writing to the Romans: “We know that up to the present time all of creation groans with pain, like the pain of childbirth. But it is not just creation alone which groans; we who have the Spirit as the first of God’s gifts also groan within ourselves as we wait for God to make us his sons and set our whole being free.”
True hope
He continues by clarifying what is meant by ‘hope’. “For it was by hope that we were saved; but if we see what we hope for, then it is not really hope. For who hopes for something he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:22-25). Our hope is based on a deep faith and trust in a loving God as the Source and Goal of all living. It is not merely the hope that we express in a phrase such as, “I hope the weather will be fine tomorrow.” Rather it is a confidence of one day experiencing something which is at present beyond our grasp.
The readings of this Sunday are appropriate as we approach the end of the Church year and we are drawn to reflect on the end of all things and especially the end of our own individual lives. As the Preface for Christian Burial reminds us: “Lord, for your faithful people life is changed, not ended. When the body of our earthly dwelling lies in death we gain an everlasting dwelling place in heaven.” Next Sunday we will consider what we should be doing in the meantime.
C32 GOD WILL NEVER LOSE HIS CHILDREN
Jesus never spoke too much about life after the resurrection. That could have been the reason why some rich Sadducees started making fun about the faith in the resurrection of the dead. Jesus responded more seriously and addressed the real issue.
First of all, he said, life after the resurrection will not be a continuation of this life, as we know it now. It is wrong to imagine life after death in terms of our own present experiences.
There will be a total change between this life on earth and the future life, after death, which will depend on God’s bountiful love. The latter will be an absolutely new life. We can only hope for, but never explain or describe it.
The new Christian generations always kept a humble and honest attitude towards this mystery of “eternal life”. Paul tells the Christians of Corinth that it is something that “eye has never seen, or ear heard and no man has ever imagined.” It is something that “God has prepared for those who love Him.”
These words become an encouraging warning and a joyous expectation. First of all, heaven is something “totally new” that no experience on earth can compare; and, on the other hand, such “new life” has been prepared by God for the total fulfilment of our highest aspirations. Faith is not simply the satisfaction of our human desires, but the foundation of our hopes and expectations based on God.
That is, precisely, what Jesus meant when he referred to something all the Sadducees accepted: that God in the Biblical tradition was “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” All the Patriarchs had died, yet God continued to be their God, their protector and friend. Death could not destroy God’s love and fidelity towards them.
Jesus draws his own definitive conclusion with regard to our faith: “God is not a God of the dead, but of the living; for Him everyone is alive.” God is an inexhaustible fountain of life. Death does not take away his beloved sons and daughters. When we, here on earth, weep their loss, God sees them full of new life as they are welcomed by their loving Father.
According to Jesus, the relationship between God and his children cannot be destroyed by death. His love is much stronger than our biological extinction. That is why, in humility and simplicity, we dare to say, “To you, o my God, I lift up my soul. Do not let me be shamed.” ( Psalm 25, 1-2 )
C32 Marriage Made In Heaven -
Our gospel reading for today calls to center stage a group of men seldom mentioned in the New Testament – maybe a half-dozen times, and three of those are parallel accounts. They were known as Sadducees. Unlike the Pharisees, their chief concern was not religion, but business and politics. They were the aristocrats, the ruling class of Jerusalem. They had a religion of sorts, but it was mostly a matter of expedience.
They were in charge of the temple and used it to make themselves wealthy. Politically,
the Sadducees were pragmatic, philosophically they were epicurean and hedonist; morally, they were conservative and liberal; theologically, they were heretics.
Their only concern with Jesus was his threat to their power and profit. Had he left them alone, they would have gladly left him alone, too. But Jesus would not do that. He kept doing and saying things that threatened their business. Jesus taught the people that God loved gentiles as well as Jews and that human relationships were more important than temple sacrifices and offerings.
After a time, the Sadducees concluded that Jesus was indeed a dangerous fanatic and had to be dealt with. So they set about to discredit him.
One day in the temple, they confronted him with a riddle, to which they thought there was no answer. It was about a woman who was successively married to seven brothers. She married one; he died; so she married the next, and so on until all seven were dead.
Finally, the woman also died.
That was their story, and on the basis of it they asked this question: “At the resurrection, whose wife will she be?” The intent of the question was to disprove the idea of immortality and, thereby, discredit Jesus by making him look foolish.
As the Sadducees saw it, this was the basic religious disagreement between them and Jesus. He believed in life after death and they did not. But the difference between them really ran far deeper than that. Their disagreement was not simply about life after death, but about life itself. They thought of life in terms of quantity. Jesus thought of life in terms of quality. They thought of life in terms of time. Jesus thought of life in terms of eternity. They thought of life as a strictly human endeavor. Jesus thought of life as a great adventure with God.
This is not to say the Sadducees were atheist, at least not in the theoretical sense. They had a vague concept of God, but it never occurred to them that God had anything to do with life or that life had anything to do with God. As far as they were concerned, life originated with birth and ended with death. In between those two events, a person did the best he could with whatever he god, because he was all of it. When it was over, it was over.
Jesus, on the other hand, believed that God was totally involved in life. He said, “God is not the God of the dead but of the living. All are alive in him.” From that statement,
we can briefly draw three lessons about life.
Number one: life is a gift from God.
It comes about, of course, through the biological process of birth. But that is simply the method God uses to share the great gift of life with his children. Jesus believed this about his own life and the lives of others as well. This was the reason he treated all people with respect. They were the children of his Father. The spark of life that burned within them was a direct gift from God. If you and I would learn to think of ourselves and our neighbors in that sense, we would do a better job of living. Remember this: your life and the life of every other person you will meet this day is a gift from God. That is the first lesson.
The second is this: Life is a mission for God.
How often we encounter that in the thoughts and teachings of Jesus. On one occasion he said to his disciples, “Doing the will of him who sent me and bringing his work to completion is my food.” On another occasion he said, “It is not to do my own will that I have come down from heaven, but to do the will of him who sent me.”
For Jesus all of living was a sacred mission assigned to him by the Father. This was true, not only for him, but for every person on earth. He remembered how God had introduced himself to Moses as “The God of Abraham, the God Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” These were the ancient patriarchs through whom God had brought into being the nation of Israel. Moses was the man whom God had used to lead his people out of bondage.
Looking back across the years, Jesus could see the unfolding purpose of God. And then He saw himself as a part of that same purpose. How urgently you and I need that kind of vision. Your life is not a meaningless accident. It is a divine mission. Your assignment is to finish the work of the God who sent you. This is the second lesson.
The third is this: Life is a companionship with God.
Listen once more as Jesus talked with his disciples: “I am not alone; I have at my side the one who sent me, even the Father.” Then again, “The One who has sent me is with me. He has not deserted me.”
Jesus had such an awareness of the presence of God that he was never alone, not even in the hours of solitude. God, for him, was not back there in history, or up there in heaven, or out there in the future. He was the ever-present Father, Friend, Helper, and Companion. When we understand this, it is plain to see why Jesus believed in life after death. Life for Jesus was a great adventure with God; so real, so rich, and so radiant that it was worth going on with forever. For you and me, it can be the same.
C32 Resurrection of the Dead - Lk 20, 27-38
The Sadducees accepted only the first five books of Moses, and, in practice, did not believe in life after death, as such doctrine was not included in the Torah. But, in order to ridicule Jesus’ doctrine, they accepted some of the Pharisees’ teachings. One such
doctrine was the law of Levirate ( Dt. 25 ), which provided for the marriage of a widow to her deceased husband’s brother ( to ensure the continuance of his name and line ). The Sadducees made the story all the more ridiculous by saying that one such widow had married seven brothers, as all seven died without giving her an offspring!
Jesus dignified their proposal by quoting scriptures from the Torah ( Ex 3, 6 ): “God is the Lord of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” which means they are still living. The question, however, remains with regard to the kind of life after death. The resurrection of the dead is not a continuation of the earlier life but a transformation into a new life. The dead rise to acquire a new and perpetual relationship with God – and no one else.
Marriage will no longer be a necessary means of perpetuating one’s name or the population. Christians have always believed “in the resurrection of the dead, and life everlasting.” We refer to it as “heaven”, “paradise”, “the beatific vision of God”, “eternal rest”, etc. Life here on earth might be wonderful – at least for some people – but it’s not forever. No matter what some fortune-tellers say, we can’t talk to dead people. That’s why so many people have such different ideas about what happens after we die.
All major religions teach a very big idea about what happens after we die. Our bodies really die, but something in us keeps on living. Even those who do not believe in God
accept that death is not the end of everything. The name for the part of us that lives on after death is different for all religions. Jews and Christians call it our soul. The ancient Egyptians called the soul ‘ba’. The Hindus call the soul ‘atman’. In Islam the soul is called nafs, or sometimes ruh. The Arabic word for soul, ruh, is the same as the Hebrew word ruach, and they both mean breath or spirit. A soul or breath is the part of us that is good or kind, loving and protecting, curious and caring.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam teach that our souls keep living after our bodies die. And where do they live? You guessed it! They live in heaven or hell; heaven and hell mean pretty much the same for Jews, Christians and Muslims. Heaven is the place where the souls of good people go after the body they were living in dies and hell is the place where the souls of bad people go.
People wonder a lot what heaven and hell look like, and people wonder even more about how you know if you are good enough for heaven or bad enough for hell.
These are big questions, but they can’t be answered for sure until after we die and look around, and when that happens there will be no telephones to call home and tell folks the news! Our liturgical language, however, keeps feeding us with images and ideas of a material paradise. The funeral prayers and hymns continue to promise us ‘eternal rest’, the company of the angels, the vision of God face to face, etc.
ls the Sadducees that, after we die, our social relations and life cease to exist. There will be no marriages, no family relationships. We shall all be like angels. Life after death will cease to be a world of human relationships. Our lives will be in union with God. “God is the God of the living and the dead.” That is often expressed as the ‘plenitude of life – union with God.’ God ultimately will be the fulfillment of love.
Plenitude of life’ means neither ‘rest for all eternity’ nor continuing to live without stopping. ‘Eternal rest’ may express the belief in the cessation of all pains and tribulations that we suffered in this present life.
The image of heaven has never been very appealing. In spite of scripture’s description of gold streets, pearl gates and a perfectly heavenly banquet, we are not moved. Nor does the thought of staring at God for ever excite us. One bored child in heaven is reported to have asked God: “If I am very good, may I play in hell tomorrow?”
Like the Sadducees, we miss the whole point. Heaven is not an escape from hell; it is not the lesser of two evils; it is not the reward for good behavior; it is not passively looking at God. Heaven is the fulfillment of all our desires; it is being intimate with God, knowing God, loving God. That is why religion has been called “the search for lost intimacy.”
