A Homily – The Gospel of Luke 20.27 - 38 ©
The Gospel of the Day – 2016.11.06
The Letter of the Law
Some
Sadducees – those who say that there is no resurrection – approached
him and they put this question to him, ‘Master, we have it from Moses in
writing, that if a man’s married brother dies childless, the man must marry the
widow to raise up children for his brother. Well then, there were seven
brothers. The first, having married a wife, died childless. The second and then
the third married the widow. And the same with all seven, they died leaving no
children. Finally the woman herself died Now, at the resurrection, to which of
them will she be wife since she had been married to all seven?’
Jesus
replied, ‘The children of this world take wives and husbands, but those who are
judged worthy of a place in the other world and in the resurrection from the
dead do not marry because they can no longer die, for they are the same as the
angels, and being children of the resurrection they are sons of God. And Moses
himself implies that the dead rise again, in the passage about the bush where
he calls the Lord the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.
Now he is God, not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all men are in
fact alive.’
Legalism Rejoined
As Christians,
we should never be like the Sadducees depicted here in this narrative.
Avoid
the trap of legalisms, and the legalistic perspective or approach to faith.
Faith
should be simple, in the way that Jesus himself expressed it. Faith means
trust. Trust in our greatest hopes.
Christian
hope is founded in the resurrection. It is not merely a belief that we continue
in the next world, but that the next world is governed by God, in justice, and
love.
Marriage
today is much the same as it was in the ancient world, it is a contract;
sometimes between two people, sometimes between families. It concerns the
ownership of property. It is a transaction, it concerns the promise of future
transactions, and the disposition of properties; that will have grown or diminished
in value according to the circumstances and choices of the individuals.
In
some cultures marriage has come to have many other meanings. For many,
marriage, is more about love and romance, commitment and trust. Nevertheless, the
core of marriage remains the same, it is a contract.
In
the next world, the Christian promise is one in which the need for private
property has disappeared. It is one in which there is no want, material needs
have altogether vanished. We relate to the personhood of one another on an altogether
different level and so there is no need for marriage.
The
question that the Sadducees put to Jesus is moot.
Jesus,
however, gets to a deeper point. He takes his interlocuters on a faith journey,
and he instructs them from the teaching of Moses, regarding Moses’ own faith in
the next life.
He
takes them on this journey because the Sadducees were a conservative group
within the Hebrew tradition. They did not believe in the afterlife, and they
considered themselves to be strict interpreters of the books of Moses and the
law.
Jesus
shows them that Moses’ own words suggest that God, the creator of the universe,
that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Joseph, expressed in the present
tense not the past. Indicating that God is the God of the living, not the dead,
concluding this teaching with an expression of the universal faith that all
people are alive to God, that there is no death.
There
is no death, not now, not ever.
32nd
Sunday in Ordinary Time
