Saturday of the 33rd Week in Course 2023
I recently read an article summarizing statements made by likely voters in one of the state primaries. One of the participants lamented about the state of the nation and asked, “Is there anyone other than me that feels like this is Rome 476 A.D.?” (Of course, the year 476 is an arbitrary date assigned to the elimination of the Western Roman Empire, but it had been in major decline already for a century.) Similar questions are being asked about the Church today, since Catholic Church attendance and membership is way down from its peak, and just about every non-Catholic denomination is having similar issues.
So is civilization in terminal decline? Our reading from the Greek Old Testament today looks back at Israelite history in the era after the conquests of Alexander and the establishment of his successors’ kingdoms. It homes in on a particularly nasty time of Seleucid rule by a particularly nasty monarch named Antiochus IV Epiphanes. If you look at the cognomen “Epiphanes” you can see why the Israelites loathed the man. His father had conquered the land from the Egyptian Ptolemies and the son thought he was godlike. “Epiphanes” reminds us of Epiphany, and this guy thought he was a manifestation of the god Zeus. He even erected a statue of himself as that god in the Temple of Jerusalem. The Jews called it the “horrible abomination.” This triggered the Jewish rebellion under the Maccabees, which wrested control of much of the Holy Land from the Greeks. Meanwhile, Antiochus was waging war against the Persians, and losing. The writer of First Maccabees attributes his sickness and death to his getting news about the defeat of his armies by the Jewish insurgents.
Time after time, the people of God in just about every century have been under assault by elements of the culture and politics, and it often seemed to the faithful that they were just in a permanent posture of defeat. But when they returned to the Word of God and reformed their lives, as a people, so very often God’s redemptive actions caused them to sing the psalm we prayed today, and give thanks to the Lord with their “whole hearts.”
In other words, the victory is God’s, but sometimes it takes a long time to achieve. And sometimes that victory is only in the willingness of martyrs to give up everything in witness to their faith.
Jesus today is disputing with the Temple crowd, the Sadducees, about a vision of the victory of God’s people in the age to come, after a general Resurrection that the Sadducees did not believe in. You see, they didn’t consider any Scripture to be God’s revealed Word except Torah, the first five books of the OT. So they came to Jesus with a conundrum, which might actually have been inspired by one of the books of Maccabees. Under levirate marriage law, if a man married a woman but died without children, his brother was expected to marry the woman and give her offspring. So the Sadducees hypothesized that happening, with seven brothers marrying the one woman, and all eight dying. To demonstrate their point, they then asked whose wife she would be after the Resurrection. They thought they had proved there would be no Resurrection.
Jesus then performed a genius move, as He frequently did, and cited the book of Exodus, right from Torah, that “God is God of the living, not of the dead” by pointing out the Word of God in Torah calling Himself the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Now they were certainly not alive in this world in the first century AD. So they must be alive with God. Hence Torah must demand belief in life with God after this earthly life. The scribes liked the answer, because they were mostly Pharisees, who did believe in the Resurrection.
So what does this tell us today? Trust God, believe in His Word, and don’t nit-pick with Jesus. He tells us to believe in Him, love God with all our capabilities, and cherish our neighbors, loving even our enemies. That’s what’s important.
