Word to the Wise
Saturday, November 22, 2025 - Saturday in the 33th Week in Ordinary Time
[1 Macc 6:1-13 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....[Luke]
NOVEMBER 22 ST. CECILIA, virgin martyr
The liturgical year is almost over. The scriptures assigned for the celebration of the Eucharist have been focusing, appropriately enough, on the last days of Jesus' ministry and on questions related to the end of time and his return. The story in today's gospel scripture is set in Jesus' last days in Jerusalem. His adversaries, which included the Sadducees party. They represented the Jerusalem Jewish aristocracy who had reached a kind of "live and let live" relationship with the Roman authorities and did not want this arrangement disturbed. So, they bring one of their differences with the Pharisees to Jesus in the form of an absurd question of the sort that rabbis might debate, i.e. the woman married to seven brothers in a row, and whose wife would she be at the final resurrection. The Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the body. The Sadducees did not. Jesus' response pleased the scribes and Pharisees: "Teacher, you have answered well!" But they had other issues with him that led them to make common cause with the Sadducees to get rid of Jesus.
Jesus' response, however, reaches beyond the absurdity of the question to speak to us of life after death as well as to the existence of angels! Human imagination has supplied white robes and golden harps from the book of Revelation [5:8, etc.]. What is important is that Jesus assures us of life after death and the importance of being "deemed worthy." Preparation for life after death is an earthly lifelong process of conversion and fidelity to the Lord. Human relationships, etc., will not be relevant in eternal life. AMEN
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