Dear Brothers and Sisters,
The liturgy of this Sunday’s Mass brings our attention to one of the truths of faith that we say in the Creed: the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. In the first reading we find the mother of seven sons who preferred death to betraying God’s Law by eating swine’s flesh. After having been tortured by the king’s servants, the fourth son declared: one cannot but choose to die at the hands of men and to cherish the hope that God gives of being raised again by him.
At the time of Jesus Christ all the Jews believed in this resurrection except the Sadducees. In today’s gospel passage some Sadducees approached Jesus with the intention of tripping him up. According to the law, if a man were to die without children, then his brother would be under obligation to marry the widow and provide for the descendants. The Sadducees cunningly pose for Jesus a situation of this type of a man with seven brothers: in the resurrection, they ask, whose wife will the woman be? With this far-fetched example the Sadducees hope to ridicule the teaching of the resurrection of the body.
Ignoring their absurd situation Jesus goes on to speak the truth about the resurrection of the body. He tells us that after death people are not married or given in marriage since they are like angels. They are living a communion with God and with the others in heaven that is much more intense than any marriage could be. In eternal life we will be fulfilled in a way we cannot imagine. The mistake of the Sadducees is that they are ‘sad’, and they think eternal life is like life here on earth without death. How depressing is that!!
Jesus goes on to say the God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who continue to live, in heaven. These patriarchs are physically dead, but not spiritually. They live on, like the deceased in our families, in their immortal souls, waiting for the resurrection of their bodies.
We profess this belief in the resurrection of our bodies every time we say the creed, and it is good that we remind ourselves during this month of November that our bodies will be eternally united to our souls at the end of time. This is also why the Church does not recommend cremation. What we do with our bodies is serious; it is not just an instrument, as many think today. Let us reflect a bit on this reality as we come to the end of the liturgical year and as the whole Church prays during this month for those passed from this world to the next.