At the end of the liturgical year, the readings focus on the Resurrection of those who have persevered in faith. As we hear of the heroic faith of Jesus in the Gospel and the seven Jewish martyrs in 2 Maccabees, let us join them in praying the refrain of this Sunday’s responsorial psalm: “Lord, when your glory appears, my joy will be full” (Ps 17).
In the 2 Maccabees reading, the seven brothers die for their refusal to violate God’s law. Each gives a speech, expressing some aspect of Resurrection faith. The first affirms courageous fidelity to God’s law in the face of death: “We are ready to die rather than transgress the laws of our ancestors.” The second expresses a transcendent hope for a life beyond this physical life: “ ... you are depriving us of this present life, but the king of the world will raise us up to life again forever.” The third believes that God, who created life, can also restore it beyond death: “It was from Heaven that I received these (his bodily parts); for the sake of his laws I disdain them; from him I hope to receive them again.” Finally, the fourth brother states his hope that Resurrection will be granted only for those who have been faithful: “It is my choice to die at the hands of men with the God given hope of being restored to life by him; but for you, there will be no Resurrection to life.”
The reading from Second Thessalonians also offers hope in the Resurrection during a time of persecution and confusion. Because they were confused by the delay of Christ’s triumphant return (see 2 Thes 2:1-12), some Christians at Thessalonika were spreading the rumor that the Day of the Lord was at hand and were leading others into disorderly and irresponsible behavior (see 2 Thes 3:6-16). In that context, the Pauline author prays that the community will persevere in faith: “God our Father, who loved us and in his mercy gave us eternal consolation and hope, console your hearts and strengthen them for every good work and word.” He also requests prayers for himself and his co-workers as they struggle to be faithful to preaching the Gospel:
“Pray that we may be delivered from confused and evil men. For not everyone has faith; the Lord, however, keeps faith; he it is who will strengthen you and guard you against the evil one.”
In today’s Gospel, Jesus, shortly before his own death, affirms his belief in Resurrection against a challenge from some Sadducees who claimed there was no Resurrection. This hostile encounter occurs in the Jerusalem temple after Jesus has driven out the money changers and become embroiled in a heated controversy with the chief priests, scribes, and elders over his authority to be teaching in the temple (see Lk 19:45,?20:26). The Sadducees attempt to ridicule belief in Resurrection by proposing a case from a law which was designed to keep property within the family (see Deuteronomy 25) by demanding that a woman marry her deceased husband’s brother. In their unlikely example a single woman married seven consecutive brothers in an attempt to raise posterity to the first brother (see also Gen 38). They want to know whose wife she will be at the Resurrection.
Jesus’ answer stands in the same tradition as the author of Second Maccabees. First, he asserts the radical transformation God will bring about “in the age to come”:
“The children of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those judged worthy of a place in the age to come and of Resurrection from the dead do not. They become like angels and are no longer liable to death. Children of the Resurrection, they are children of God.”
Then he goes on to prove this belief from a text in Exodus, a portion of the Hebrew Scriptures that the Sadducees themselves accepted as authoritative.
“Moses in the passage about the bush showed that the dead rise again when he called the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”
Because these patriarchs had died before the time of the revelation to Moses at the burning bush, Jesus can conclude that they must now be living with God because “God is not the God of the dead but of the living. All are alive for him.”
By limiting their hopes to this worldly concerns about property and descent, the Sadducees demonstrate their lack of faith in God’s power and the impoverished character of their own religious imaginations which are bound to these materialistic preoccupations.
