A preacher related that: YEARS AGO, THE brilliant but cantankerous Baptist preacher Carlyle Marney was speaking to some students at a Christian college. When a student asked, "Dr. Marney, would you say a word or two about the resurrection of the dead?"
Marney replied, "I will not discuss the resurrection with people like you: I don't discuss such things with anyone under 30. Look at you all: in the prime of life. Never have you known honest-to-God failure, heartburn, impotency, solid defeat, brick walls or mortality. You're extremely apt and handsome—kids who have never in all of your lives been 30 miles from home, or 20 minutes into the New Testament, or more than a mile and a half from a Baptist or Methodist church, or within a thousand miles of any issue that mattered to a kingdom that matters. So, what can you know of a world that makes sense only if Christ is raised?"
In our Gospel today, the Sadducees are asking Jesus about the resurrection but don't get what Jesus is talking about, and they don't really want to get it from their world of dominating the positions of civil and religious power.
Unlike Carlyle Marney, however, Jesus is very patient and carefully adapts himself to the limited framework of the Sadducee's belief system in order to really reach and teach them.
The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection nor angels nor spirit... (Acts 23:8). They denied individual personal survival beyond death or in immortality mainly because they thought that it is not in their canon of Scripture, which only entailed the first 5 books of the Old Testament. [73 books in Bible for Catholic Christians].
For the Sadducees, continuity and survival came through progeny, the family, the clan, the tribe. They practiced Levite marriage described in Deuteronomy 25:5-10, to provide an heir after the husband had passed away.
Very cleverly, Jesus alludes to a book in from their limited canon—Exodus 3:6 to prove that Moses does indeed teach that the dead are raised.
Some lessons to learn from Jesus:
1. Biblical-proof texting can get you the wrong answers.
E.g. sometimes Catholics join an ecumenical bible study but there is really no such thing as neutral bible study because it will reflect the biases of the presenter. Unless you really know at least some basic Catholic apologetics and invest in a couple good Catholic bible commentaries, its best to stick to Catholic bible studies.
For example, Jesus’ answer supports the Catholic doctrine of the communion of Saints and why we should read the lives of the Saints and ask them to pray for us.
The saints are not really dead at all. They’re far more alive than we are on earth. Jesus said, God “is not the God of the dead but of the living.” When the Lord spoke these words, he was speaking about Moses, Abraham and Issac: three Patriarchs who had been “dead” for centuries. Therefore since the majority of Christians pray for one another, like how others pray for Paul in our Second Reading, so how then, is it different to ask the Christians in heaven to pray for us on earth?
How do I deal with those who deny important aspects of my faith? How do I respond to questions about my faith? [Catholic.com is a great go to resource].
2. Jesus’ answer to the Sadducee also asserts that they are making false assumptions that the risen life is in complete continuity with our life on earth. Heaven is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction (Benedict XVI).
As Bishop Baron says, which is the perfect answer for any modern day Sadducee:
The body is a means of communication. The most intense personal communication possible is that which happens between two married people — sexual, psychological, and personal intimacy. Given the limitations and restrictions of our bodies here below, this type of intimacy is possible only with one other person in marriage.
The heavenly state involves a body too, but a transformed, transfigured, and elevated body — what St. Paul called a spiritual body. It is still a means of communication, but now it is so intense and spiritualized that it can mediate an intimate communion with all those who love the Lord. We are not less than bodily in heaven; we are super-bodily. We communicate more extensively and more intimately, and with everyone. Hence, in heaven we are not given to one person in marriage, but to all. All of this becomes plain in the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
In essence, we’ll experience a marital level of intimacy with everyone in heaven, a state we’re only capable of reaching with one person in this world.
3. Lastly, our Readings this Sunday about belief in the resurrection, show that, with the virtue of Fortitude, a believer gets the grace of martyrdom. The most prominent motive for the martyrs is their belief in the bodily resurrection of the dead and in postmortem rewards and punishments.
E.g. In our First Reading, King Antiochus of the Assyrian empire was persecuting Jews because he thought that to obey the Torah was an act of rebellion. As one of the martyred family members said when he was near death: "It is my choice to die at the hands of men with the hope God gives of being raised up by him; but for you, there will be no resurrection to life."
As William Sloane Coffin once warned, “Hell is truth seen too late.”
We don’t become angels for those who go to heaven, but we will have resurrected bodies that move with the speed of thought like angels.
Jesus gives a firm and positive answer: the paths of glory lead FROM the grave.
What will I be in eternity? And where?
Amen.
