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.