It’s the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time and we are nearing the end of this year’s cycle of teaching the magisterium of the Catholic Church using the Bible wherein the Lord communicates with us with lessons often via parable and first person encounters. Today’s Sunday gospel comes from Luke 20: 27-40 and it deals with the question on the resurrection.
“27Some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, came forward and put this question to him, 28 saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us, “If someone’s brother dies leaving a wife but no child, his brother must take the wife and raise up descendants for his brother.
29 Now there were seven brothers; he first married a woman but died childless 30 Then the second 31 and the third married her, and likewise all the seven died childless. 32 Finally the woman also died. 33 Now at the resurrection whose wife will that woman be? For all seven had been married to her.
34 Jesus said to them, “The children of this age marry and remarry: 35 but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. 36 They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise.
37 That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush, when he called ‘Lord’ the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; 38 and he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.” 39 Some of the scribes said in reply, “Teacher you have answered well.” 40 And they no longer dared to ask him anything.
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This gospel reading happens when the Sadducees and the Scribes met with the Lord Jesus and the Sadducees threw the question about a woman who married seven brothers, all of whom died without any child. This was a trap question because the Sadducees do not believe in the Resurrection. But first who were the Sadducees in the first place?
The Jewish government at that time was a Theocracy. It is a system of government in which priests rule in the name of God. The Sadducees where basically administrators of the Jewish State and controlled their Armed Forces and collaborated with their Roman conquerors for autonomy, which is why they were a powerful group who controlled the Sanhedrin.
Because of their high status in life, they began developing their own doctrine like for instance the soul is not immortal. There is no afterlife or resurrection. There are no rewards or any penalties after this life. Therefore, there is no heaven or hell. Also, they did they believe in fate. On this alone, if you were a member of the Sadducees, therefore, you didn’t believe in the Ten Commandments that was handed down by God himself who wrote these commandments on a stone tablet.
In answering the Sadducees, our Lord Jesus sort of describe what we all shall be if we get lucky to enter the kingdom of God in heaven when he said, “The children of this age marry and remarry: but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise.” One of the basic elements of a marriage ordained by God is that the union of man and woman is for procreation. In heaven, there is no more any need for procreation as we are all considered children of God and, therefore, we would be like a family of angels.
Jewish history tells us that the Pharisees and Sadducees vanished after the destruction of the second temple 40 years after the resurrection of Christ as they were no longer mentioned in the Talmud. Cleary in denying the reality of the resurrection, the Sadducees already played the role of the anti-Christ because if our Lord Jesus Christ did not resurrect from the dead, then he would just be an ordinary person, just like us but isn’t God.
But our Lord Jesus Christ isn’t an ordinary human being. He is the Son of God and the only one who prophesied his gruesome death and resurrection. Billions of human beings were born from mothers on this planet, but there will be only one Jesus Christ and by denying the resurrection, we are denying the divinity of Christ.
However, Jesus Christ is truly present. His body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Holy Eucharist gives us hope that we will someday see him face to face in life eternal when we experience our own resurrection. While the Sadducees have disappeared, the Sadducees of this generation have reappeared under a new nom de guerre called Atheists who continue to deny the existence of God. They argue that if there is no God, there is no heaven, hell and even the resurrection. But only fools believe in this!