Living Beyond What We Can See Series

Title: Living Beyond What We Can See

Intro: We are people who know that death is not the final word.

Scripture: Luke 20:27-38

Reflection

Dear Friends,

My dear friends, I want to tell you a story that has stayed with me for years now.

There was a little girl in our parish—I’ll call her Maria—who lost her grandmother when she was only seven years old. At the funeral, she stood by the coffin, her small hand clutching her mother’s sari, and she asked me a question that pierced my heart: “Father, where did my grandmother go? Will I ever see her again?”

I looked into those innocent eyes, filled with tears and confusion, and I realized something profound. This child wasn’t asking me for theology. She wasn’t looking for complicated explanations about heaven and eternity. She was simply asking, “Does love end? Does life just stop?”

And that, my friends, is exactly what the Sadducees were asking Jesus in today’s Gospel reading from Luke 20:27-38, though they didn’t know it. They thought they were being clever, setting a trap with their ridiculous story about seven brothers and one wife. But beneath their mockery, beneath their intellectual pride, they were really asking the same question that every human heart asks when faced with death: “Is this all there is?”

Sometimes we need to have our certainties shaken. Sometimes we need to be reminded that there is more to reality than what we can see with our eyes or hold in our hands.

The Sadducees were the religious elite of their time, the educated ones, the ones who prided themselves on their rational approach to faith. They didn’t believe in angels. They didn’t believe in spirits. They didn’t believe in resurrection. To them, when you died, that was it. Finished. End of story.

So they came to Jesus with their puzzle, their trick question about the woman and the seven brothers. “Whose wife will she be in the resurrection?” they asked, barely hiding their smirks. They thought they had found the perfect trap, the ultimate proof that belief in resurrection was absurd.

But Jesus, as always, saw right through them. He didn’t just answer their question—He exposed the poverty of their imagination. “You are wrong,” He told them, “because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God” (Mark 12:24).

Think about that for a moment. These were men who had memorized the Torah, who spent their entire lives studying scripture. Yet Jesus said they didn’t really know it. Why? Because they had reduced God to their own understanding. They had made faith small enough to fit inside their own minds.

Jesus tells them something revolutionary: “Those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:35-36).

Do you hear what He’s saying? He’s telling them—and us—that the life to come is not just a continuation of this life. It’s not just more of the same. It’s something completely different, something so wonderful and so beyond our experience that we cannot even imagine it properly.

But then Jesus says something even more beautiful. He says, “Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive” (Luke 20:38).

Let that sink in, my friends. All of them are alive. Your grandmother who passed away last year—she is alive to God. That child you lost too soon—alive to God. That spouse who left you grieving—alive to God. That parent whose loss still makes your heart ache—alive to God.

This is not wishful thinking. This is not sentimentality. This is the foundation of our faith. As St. Paul writes, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Corinthians 15:19-20).

I think about the story of Rabbi Hofetz Chaim, living in that simple room with just his books and a bench. When the tourist asked where his furniture was, the rabbi’s response was perfect: “Where is yours?” We are all just passing through, friends. All of us.

But here’s what materialism does to us—and materialism is not just about loving money or possessions. Materialism is believing that this world, this life, this physical existence is all there is. Materialism tells us to grab everything we can now, because there’s nothing after. Materialism whispers in our ears: accumulate, possess, control, secure yourself, because when you die, it’s over.

And that lie, that poisonous lie, makes us anxious and greedy and afraid. It makes us cling to things that don’t last. It makes us build our lives on sand.