Between fear and illusions, only one hope
Gospel: Luke 20:27-38
Fr Jijo Kandamkulathy CMF
Claretian Missionaries
Resurrection was a hot topic of debate among the Sadducees and Pharisees, though both groups were religious. In our days, this debate is taking place between those who believe in God and otherwise. The Sadducees constituted the class of the rich, who were collaborators of the Roman government. All chief priests (who were primarily responsible for the death of Jesus) belonged to this sect.
While the Pharisees believed in the resurrection, the Sadducees declared themselves skeptics since Torah did not speak about resurrection. Moreover, with the money at their disposal, they were able to enjoy paradise in this world and no one felt any need to dream of one in the afterlife.
Listening to Jesus, the Sadducees understood that Jesus believed in resurrection. To convince him to change his opinion they resort to a text of the Torah that permits the remarriage of a widow by the younger brothers of her husband. They were not prepared for the answer that Jesus gave which did not fall into the categories that they had anticipated.
Though the Pharisees believed in resurrection they were convinced that eternal life is the perfection of this life. They, therefore, can only lower their eyes, muttering some explanation and moving away quickly among the funny comments of those present.
Jesus understands resurrection so radically different from the Pharisees. He took the floor and articulates his answer. The first: “The sons and daughters of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those of the other world … they are like angels … they are the sons/daughters of God” (vv. 34-36).
It would make no sense to die and then return to the same body, the same life. Life with God is a completely new condition: when introduced into it, a person, while maintaining his own identity, becomes a different being, immortal, equal to the angels of God.
How will this life with God be? Here is a question to which we must respond with great caution: because there is an ever-looming danger of projecting the afterlife—as the Pharisees and the Sadducees did. Whatever positive thing we experience here, infinitely multiplied: joys, pleasures, satisfaction and—as the rabbis supported—also the return to married life.
Behind certain statements, certain prayers, certain questions of many Christians today there still lurks, unfortunately, an image of the “resurrection of the dead” similar to that of the Pharisees. The resurrection mentioned by Jesus—the one that puts man in common with the angels of God—is completely different. For Jesus, a person lives on earth as a gestation. He prepares for a new birth after which there will be no other because the world he will enter will be final. In it there will not be any form of death.
Like the fetus in the mother ‘s womb that cannot imagine the world that awaits him, even so, a person is not able to imagine how life will be with God. It’s a mystery that is not revealed, not because the Lord wishes to increase the suspense and surprise, but simply because our mind is not able to understand it. “A perishable body is a burden for the soul and our tent of clay weighs down the active mind. We are barely able to know the things of earth, who then may hope to understand heavenly things?” (Wis 9:15-16)
We can approach these sublime and ineffable reality only through faith, believing that those things that no eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor any mind fathomed, God has prepared for those who love him (1 Cor 2:9). Instead of inquiring about what we are not able to understand, it is better to dwell on the certainties that the resurrection of Christ offers: in particular the fact that no two lives exist—the present and the future—but one life that continues under two completely different forms.
Indebted to Fernando Armellini SCJ for the textual analysis
© Claretian Missionaries
Cum Approbatione Ecclesiastica 2022