Exhibiting The Steadfastness Of Christ

Thirty-Second Sunday in Course 2022

Every week we rise together and recite one or the other professions of faith, either the Apostles’ Creed or the Niceno-Constantinopolitan. (That’s the long one with the word “consubstantial” in it.) One of the statements we say we believe is “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” Here as we approach the end of the Church year, it’s a good time to reflect on the meaning of that article of faith. We stand up in front of God and everyone and tell them that death is not the end for those who have faith and live in love. That is a belief that martyrs have professed in every age, even before the time of Christ.

Our Gospel today tells of seven sons who, one after another, married the same woman. Torah prescribed that if a man died without offspring, his next brother should marry the woman and raise up offspring for the deceased man. The Sadducees, foes of the Pharisees, believed only the first five books of the OT were inspired by God, so they didn’t accept any conclusions drawn from the other Scriptures, and they didn’t profess the resurrection of the just. So they threw this story at Jesus to trip Him up. “In the resurrection,” they asked, “whose wife will the woman be?” More on this in a moment.

The reason I have delayed that comment is to give you some background on some Jewish martyrs. In the second century before Christ, the Seleucid Empire of the Greeks had a particularly nasty king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who had grandiose visions of his power. He was an heir of Alexander the Great, and considered himself to be an “epiphany” of the god Zeus. The Jewish religion was offensive to him because they worshiped only one God, YHWH, and had some strange practices like not eating pork or shellfish and circumcising their sons. So he forbade all those practices and started executing observant Jews. There was a mother with seven sons, as told in the second book of Maccabees, and she refused compliance. Each of her sons was offered the chance to apostatize, and all said “no.” One by one they died under gruesome torture, and lastly the mother was murdered. Each of them professed belief in the resurrection of the just.

So the setup is perfect. With that background, you can just imagine these resurrection-denying Sadducees grinning at Jesus and thinking, “now how are you going to get out of this trap, rabbi?”

Jesus used a clever tactic. He hoisted his opponents on their own petard. The new age of the resurrected flesh will not be like this one. Here, the most profound personal union is between man and woman in matrimony. That is not needed with our spiritual bodies in the presence of God. We are united perfectly with the Blessed Trinity in heaven, and by that divine-human union we are also one with each other. No distinction of sex. No carnal union. Perfect joy in the company of God.

This teaching offended the Sadducees, but Jesus had a perfect rejoinder to them, and one that even endeared Him a little to the Pharisees. They did believe in the Resurrection of the just. So Jesus pulls out a statement from Torah that the Sadducees didn’t consider. “that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the [burning] bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living; for all live to him.” The Sadducees are wrong about all of it. There is life after this life. Our bodies and souls are reunited in an indescribable way in the resurrection. Everything is new in a new creation. And even the hero of the Sadducees, Moses, recognized it. Case closed. Score: Jesus 1, Sadducees zero.

St. Paul’s short message to his church in Thessalonika is one we should ponder and act on. Not all humans have faith. There are even Christians and Jews who act as if they don’t believe, now just as in the first century. What, then, should we do? We need to pray for each other, to be delivered from evil, as in the Lord’s prayer, and thus be strengthened by the grace of God. God loves us and wants us to be victorious in Him. So if we ask, for ourselves and each other, He will indeed direct our hearts to the love of God and the steadfastness of Christ. So if we have to give up convenience, property, even life itself because of our steadfastness, we can count on having the strength and having the right testimony.