Word to the Wise
Saturday, November 20, 2010 - Saturday in the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time
[Revelation 11:4-12 and Luke 20:27-40]The children of this age marry and remarry; but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise.
I suppose it is a kind of "poetic justice" that I should be reflecting on the rather strange question put by the Sadducees to Jesus about the poor woman who married seven brothers on a day when I will be officiating at the wedding of a former student parishioner! I surely pray she and her husband-to-be will have a better life than the lady described by the Sadducees! Nevertheless, debates of this kind were part and parcel of religious debate in Jesus' time. He uses the challenge as a way of refuting the position of the Sadducees that there is no resurrection from the dead. They believed this because they accepted only the Torah - the first five books of the Old Testament - as scripture and claimed that there was no reference to resurrection in those books. Jesus' response proves them mistaken when he calls attention to Moses' experience at the burning bush and how he calls God the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as if those three are still alive! There remains, however, a question that I hear from time to time and I suspect we all wonder about. If there is a resurrection of the dead, which is indeed a part of our faith, what will we be like when that happens? How will we look? How "old" will we be? Who will be there with us? Will our pets join us? What happens if, indeed, a person has been married more than once? Jesus' response is that these questions are irrelevant since marriage and other relationships belong to "this age." St. Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians 15:35-58 makes the same point by speaking about the transformation that is brought about by death. The difficulty that the apostles and others (Mary Magdalen and the disciples on the road to Emmaus) had in recognizing the Risen Lord might alert us to the same thing. Yes, it is a mystery. No, we don't "know" all we'd like to know about this. My prayer today for Teresa and Evan is that they will be happy together in this life. The "next" life will take care of itself. AMEN
config
view
logs
4096.0 KB
70 ms
4
