32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Sometime back, my family had another wonderful thing happen with the birth of my brother’s second grandson. My parents before they went to the Lord have gotten to see their great grandchildren, and as I held him in my hands for the first time, I, too, got a real sense of the continuity of my family, a type of physical immortality. It was an amazing feeling to know that part of the family would live on.

In actuality, this is a very Jewish way of seeing things as we find out from our readings today.  The Sadducees who question Jesus in the Gospel believe only in the continuation of their race and family through procreation.  That is why all through the Old Testament we have rules and regulations ensuring that a man has a son to carry on his name… why it was such a disgrace not to be given a child, or for a women to be barren. Without a child, there is no immortality for the Jews.

The Sadducees we read about today were very wealthy Jews, nearly all were priests of the governing class, and they accepted ONLY the written law of the Old Testament.  They only believed in the written law of Moses, they didn’t put much faith into the prophetic books, they didn’t accept the Book of Maccabees (from which our first reading came today) and they did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, in angels or even in spirits. Added to that, the Jews believed that the BODY was the person. When the body died and decayed, there was no more person.

So, they pose to Jesus a question which was purposely meant to be outrageous and silly in order to ridicule a belief in the resurrection, a concept that had become more popular in the last number of years before Jesus, and which books like Maccabees promoted.

To do this, they dig up a law from Deuteronomy which says that if a man dies childless, his wife must marry the man’s brother, and that the child resulting from that marriage should bear the name of the original dead brother. Again, it was important for one’s name to be carried on. The Sadducees really exaggerate this law, however, and tell of a woman who had to marry seven brothers, and still didn’t have a child. To make fun of the idea of resurrection, they then ask: OK, who is going to be the husband of this lady in an afterlife. And then they chuckled, thinking that they had really outwitted Jesus.

Jesus answer, however, has become the clearest affirmation by Jesus in all of Scripture that there is life after death, that we do rise from the dead. And so we can try to understand how Jesus reaches this strong conviction.

First of all Jesus says that we only marry in this world. We marry because we want a physical immortality – just like the feeling I had when I held that grandchild…but after death, there is no reason to marry any more.  Instead we will become like angels, children of God… not of man.

St. Paul in Corinthians describes it this way: “The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven” (1 Cor. 15:42-7) The man from heaven, the angel-like child of God will not live by the same rules as the man of dust.

This doesn’t help us all that much, I suppose.  I don’t really know what an angel is like, and no-one has told us what the other side is like, and neither did Jesus. It is natural for us to want to know – that is why there is such a proliferation today of fortune tellers, psychics, seances, crystal balls, books about near death experiences and so on. I think by NOT telling us any more than he does, Jesus is saying “Don’t worry about it…trust in me…God will take care of everything”. If we are going to get any reliable information about the hereafter, we will more than likely get better information from Jesus than from a TV psychic.

The second part of Jesus’ answer to the Sadducees involved going back to their own written Scripture, what they say they believed in.  Essentially his argument was that on Mount Sinai God spoke to Moses and spoke of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in terms that made it sound like they were still alive. Our God is a God of the living. If the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is a living God then Abraham, Isaac and Jacob must be alive in his presence. If they still live, there must be a resurrection of the dead. Remember that the physical body WAS the person for the Jews. In the very title he gives himself “I am who am” God reveals his purpose to the Jews.

What does this mean to all of us, still people of dust and on the earth? Our Christian HOPE does not come from knowing details, not even from knowing answers to the best and even most reasonable of questions. Our hope comes from knowing Jesus…from our trust in the power and love of God. There is no other source of hope; we aren’t going to learn any of the details on this side of our journey. So we are called to hope, to real, dynamic, living hope, based solely on our trust of God.  We are called to simply surrender our questions and our difficulties and our puzzles of logic and to trust that God will handle things better than we could ever imagine; and that his love and care for us will surpass all that we can ask or imagine. When we die, and when those we love die, God’s love does not die. And because he is a God of the living, we know that we too will live in his love.

Finally, one of the best ways to prepare spiritually for our death and the life to come is not to take harp lessons or try to figure out the details of the afterlife, but to work on trusting God more and letting go. Be willing, like the brothers in our first reading, to live your life knowing that we will live on, and making moral decisions and living to our faith in order to prepare for what is to come. Trust in the living God. As the psalmist says: He will never forsake you.

A certain foreign missionary in an Africa village was charged with translating the New Testament into the local language. In his good will, this missionary saw this as an opportunity to modernise the New Testament so as not to pass over to the Africans what he saw as the “antiquated and superstitious” world-view of the Bible. So he decided to remove from the translation every reference to spiritual beings other than God and the Holy Spirit. Evil spirits and angels, he argued, made no sense in the civilised world of today. An African priest working with him tried to convince him that the spiritual is part and parcel of both the biblical and African world-views and should therefore not be thrown out, but he would not listen to him. One day this missionary went to his favourite Christian community for Sunday service and right there before his very eyes, one of his “best” converts in the community began to act funny. She began swaying uncontrollably to the rhythm of the drums and stopped only when the music stopped. The young woman was visibly embarrassed with this development as she struggled in vain to keep herself from swaying. Everybody in the congregation understood this behaviour to be the first signs of spirit possession.

After the service, the people brought the young woman to the priest and said, “Father, what do we do?” The priest, who was in a state of shock himself, reached into his pockets and found aspirin tablets. “Give this to her,” he said, “and let me know how she feels after some days.” He came back to the mission house and literally fell sick and was unable to eat as he tried to digest the experience. Of course he knew they would bring her back to him in a worse state after a few days. Scales fell from his eyes as the zealous crusader who wanted to convert Africans from “superstitious beliefs” realized that it was probably he more than they who needed a conversion.

Like this missionary, many people today think that being a modern Christian includes jettisoning the belief in spiritual beings. But what people like this do not realize is that this is not a modern thing at all. Even at the time of Jesus there were people who did not believe in spirits, in angels and in the resurrection of the dead. These people who subscribed to a certain religious and political ideology were known as the Sadducees. In today’s gospel, some Sadducees came to Jesus and wanted to prove to him how absurd it is for any reasonable person to believe in the resurrection. They came up with the story of seven brothers who were all in turn married to the same woman and asked Jesus, “In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her” (Luke 20:33). Jesus replied that it was impossible to understand the life of the resurrection in terms of the standards of the present life since in the life to come there would be no need for anyone to marry, to start with.

Notice that the problem of the Sadducees has to do with how things are in the resurrection life whereas Jesus’ response has to do with the why of the resurrection. There is a resurrection because God is God of the living. God has created us for life and not for ultimate extinction. God does not blow us into life like bubbles, here today, gone tomorrow. No, God gifts us with life even after this earthly existence is over.

If there is one belief that the men and women of our world need today it is the belief in the resurrection. Why? Because it is the effective antidote to the infectious disease of materialism. The story is told of an American tourist who paid the 19^th century Polish rabbi Hofetz Chaim a visit. Astonished to see that the rabbi’s home was only a simple room filled with books, a table and a bench, the tourist asked, “Rabbi, where is your furniture?” “Where is yours?” replied the rabbi. “Mine?” asked the puzzled tourist. “But I’m only a visitor here. I’m only passing through.” “So am I,” said Hofetz Chaim.

Let us thank God today for revealing to us the mystery of the resurrection. Let us reaffirm our belief in the life of the world to come, since this is the most effective means to escape the stranglehold of materialism in our lives here on earth. Do we understand exactly how it will be in the life of the resurrection. Certainly, not. For we are talking about “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

There are two ways to teaching people how to pray: by word and by example. Jesus gave his disciples the Lord's Prayer as a way of them how to pray (Luke 11:1). That is direct teaching. In today's second reading from 2 Thessalonians, Paul indirectly teaches us how to pray. We have an example of the prayer of Paul. A closer look shows that what Paul teaches us here is very much the same thing that Jesus teaches his disciples on how to prayer, namely, that we should pray for the glory of God before our personal interest, our spiritual interests included.

There are two parts to the Lord's prayer. The first part is the part usually recited by the prayer leader and the second part is that part usually recited by the assembly, namely:

Part 1: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Part 2: Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

It is easy to see that the first part focusses on the glory of God while the second focusses on our personal interests, both material and spiritual. In the prayer of the Christian, the glory of God should come first, and then our personal welfare. In Paul's prayer request to the Thessalonians we see these two parts of Christian prayer as well as the priority given to the glory of God.

Finally, brothers and sisters, pray for us,
Part 1: so that the word of the Lord may spread rapidly and be glorified everywhere, just as it is among you,
Part 2: and that we may be rescued from wicked and evil people; for not all have faith. (2 Thessalonians 3:1-2)

Even though Paul was in danger of falling into the hands of "wicked and evil people" who wanted to destroy him, yet his first prayer request from the Thessalonians was "so that the word of the Lord may spread rapidly and be glorified everywhere" (verse 1). In fact, the aim of Paul's second prayer request, that he be delivered from wicked and evil people (verse 2) was only so that he would have more opportunity to spread the word of Lord and cause the Lord's name to be glorified.

Have you been to a Christian prayer meeting recently? Did you notice the kind of prayer we usually make at such prayer meetings? Have you noticed that the major part of our prayer revolves around our needs, both spiritual and temporal? What has happened to the pattern of Christian prayer as taught by Jesus and practised by Paul? Watching many Christians at prayer today, one would think that God exists for our glory and forget that, actually, it is we who exist for God's glory.

Many Christians today are making God in our own image and likeness, rather than the other way round. We go in search of a God who protects us, forgives our sins, blesses the work of our hands, and ensures that we triumph over our enemies and problems. We want a God that is on our side. But the quest for a God that ensures our welfare and does our bidding, the quest for a God that guarantees our personal or group interests, easily leads to idolatry. God is the potter and we the clay. When we turn ourselves into the potter and seek a God that is like clay in our hands, a God who is there to glorify us and make our dreams come true, we have stepped from true Christian religion into the realm of idolatry.

Jesus taught us not to pray as the pagans do. Pagans serve idols whom they believe are there to do their bidding. Christians, on the other hand, serve the living God, whose will and glory come before our welfare. Let us today resolve to pray as Jesus taught us and as Paul showed us, by putting the will of God and His glory ahead of all our needs of soul and body.

By Bishop Kasomo Daniel PhD; D.Sc

The Catholic Bishop of The Society of St. Peter and Paul (SSPP)