Cycle C | Ordinary Time | Week 32
REFLECTION
– By Fr Ugo Ikwuka
Archway, London
At every stage of our development, we all have burning questions we want to ask God. About the age of four, I wanted to know if it is really true that the sound of thunder means God is moving His furniture. I also wanted to know if it is really true that when you swallow a seed, it germinates from your head. About the age of seven, I wanted to know where baby brothers come from and how they can be sent back.
The Sadducees in today’s Gospel had their own questions. But unlike our innocent childhood curiosity, theirs is not to seek clarification but to trap or humiliate Jesus. Like many “enlightened” people today, the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. They feel that once someone dies, the person simply disappears into oblivion. Perhaps that’s why they are ‘sad, you see!’ So, to ridicule Jesus, they came up with the ridiculous tale of a woman who got married in turns to seven brothers that died in succession. And they ask to whom among the brothers would the woman be wife in the next life if there is resurrection.
This mockery tone of the Sadducees sounds familiar. There are many who would rather talk down on people than objectively consider the merits of the beliefs people profess. You hear things like: “Religion is a myth for the intellectually lazy”, “You don’t really believe all the garbage of bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ, do you?” “Putting others before yourself? Get real man!”
Persecution has been part and parcel of the Judeo-Christian faith experience right from the beginnings. Our First Reading from the Second Book of Maccabees (written about 200 years before Christ) tells a story that resonates through the ages. A woman and her seven sons faced torture on account of their faith. They did this “with the hope God gives of being raised to new life….”
The sons were executed one after the other in the presence of their mother but they remained steadfast till the end. Only recently, 20 Coptic Christians were beheaded by Isis in Libya for refusing to renounce their faith. The 21st victim was not a Christian but he was so impressed with the fortitude of his friends in the face of death that he declared that their God is his God. He was martyred too.
What gives oppressors in any age their power is their conviction that life is all about existence here on earth. Therefore, by threatening to end people’s lives, tyrants compel their victims to surrender. This is why authentic Christianity that preaches undiluted physical resurrection of Jesus has always been a threat to tyrants. What inspires the martyrs however, is the reality of another life, more superior than the present one. Our world is only the shadow; the supernatural is the real.
Why the Sadducees question about HOW the resurrection could possibly be, Jesus addressed the more fundamental question of WHY the resurrection. There is resurrection because God is God of the living! As the life of every good seed does not cease on falling to the ground but goes through transformation to germinate into an even more prosperous new life, such is the natural destiny of every good person.
Jesus invokes an example they cannot possibly refute. He reminds them that when speaking to Moses in the Book of Exodus, God had identified himself by saying: “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob”. He did not say: “I was” but “I am”. Hence, if God is still their God, then necessarily they are still alive.
The Sadducees’ illustration with the woman in successive marriage was based on a tradition in the Book of Deuteronomy whereby if a man died without a son to survive him, the brother should marry his widow to get an heir who would carry on the late brother’s name. Presumably, the union would produce a son. For them (and for some traditional societies today), eternity means having such unbroken chain of succession of male offspring.
Jesus corrects this materialistic caricature. Eternal life is not just the prolongation and maximisation of earthly values and pleasures. While it is the fulfilment of all man’s longings on earth, it is truly another life of a different quality. All those who are in Christ enter into a new relationship with God and with all other people; a relationship that transcend blood and marriage. It is a relationship freed from such structures that can potentially restrict love and reaching out, as family and marriage do sometimes.
Eternal life is being free to live a life of boundless love. When Jesus speaks of eternal life, sometimes he uses the present tense to show that we can live it here and now.
The call to celibacy and religious life to which many respond is a reflection of that possibility, even if imperfectly. Only the person with the perfect freedom to let go of everything, even physical life, for the sake of truth, justice and love, and total commitment to the well-being of others is a person fully alive. Saints are simply people alive with love.
Hence, based on the conviction that the life to which God ultimately calls us is eternal, the fear that understandably grips many today on account of uncertainties is also surmountable. We could stand steadfast like the mother and her sons in the Book of Maccabees on the assurance that sharing in the resurrection of Jesus, we too shall live. The martyrs through the ages literally bet their lives on this. Pope St. John Paul II preached and lived this conviction right from the beginning of his papacy, exhorting the faithful: “Do not be afraid!”
