Thirty Second Sunday of the Year (Year C)

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

(image courtesy: Google)

The story is told of an American tourist who paid the 19th century Polish rabbi Hofetz Chaim a visit. Astonished to see that the rabbi’s home was only a simple room filled with books, a table and a bench, the tourist asked, “Rabbi, where is your furniture?” “Where is yours?” replied the rabbi. “Mine?” asked the puzzled tourist. “But I’m only a visitor here. I’m only passing through.” “So am I,” said Hofetz Chaim

In today’s gospel, some Sadducees came to Jesus and wanted to prove to him how absurd it is for any reasonable person to believe in the resurrection. They came up with the story of seven brothers who were all in turn married to the same woman and asked Jesus, “In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her” (Luke 20:33). Jesus replied that it was impossible to understand the life of the resurrection in terms of the standards of the present life since in the life to come there would be no need for anyone to marry, to start with.

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.

To put this reading in context, it is important to remember that the Sadducees accepted as their scriptures only the first five books of the Hebrew Scripture. They said that they found no evidence of the resurrection in those five books, so they rejected the idea. They put a question to Jesus that was designed to show how mistaken the whole idea of the resurrection really was. They used as their argument, what was known as Levirate marriage. This was the practice whereby if a husband died without leaving any children, the wife would then be married off to the brother assuming a brother existed. The brother of the one who died had the responsibility to raise up heirs for him. It is important to notice that Jesus does not become involved in a game of Bible bingo here. He is not going to be pulled into an argument over the authority of scripture. Rather, Jesus plays their game by quoting scripture that the Sadducees did consider authoritative. He uses a passage from Exodus, "He said further, 'I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.' " In other words, he teaches them that the question they pose is irrelevant to their argument. Implicit in his quoting from the book of the Exodus is the reality that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses all dwell with God in eternity.

Jesus always took the time to teach that all of life is under the direction of God. Everything we do should be seen in light of God's activity in the world. We cannot remove ourselves from God's presence, so all of our life is lived within that presence.

Let us thank God today for revealing to us the mystery of the resurrection. Let us reaffirm our belief in the life of the world to come, since this is the most effective means to escape the stranglehold of materialism in our lives here on earth. Do we understand exactly how it will be in the life of the resurrection? Certainly, not. For we are talking about “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

 

Happy Sunday