Introduction: As we near the end of the Church's liturgical year, the readings become more eschatological-- having to do with the end times. The main theme of today’s readings is the resurrected life of glory in heaven. They invite us to consider the true meaning of the resurrection in our lives.

Answering a question of the Sadducees, in today’s gospel Jesus explains how heavenly life with God in glory is totally different from earthly life. It provides us with a glimpse of our "blessed hope." [Tit. 2:13]. Jesus tells his adversaries who had asked an outrageously silly question in order to ridicule the belief of the Pharisees in the resurrection, that if a woman had seven husbands during her life she would not be married to any of them in heaven because marriage is for this life only and there is no marriage in heaven. In this controversy with the Sadducees, Jesus combines belief in the afterlife with a belief in God, fusing one with the other...

Exegesis: The context: Jesus reaches Jerusalem as part of a well planned plot to trap Jesus, the chief priests, the scribes and the Pharisees approach him with controversial questions: i) "Tell us, by what authority are you doing these things and who is it who gave you this authority?" (Lk 20:2), ii) "Is it lawful for us to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" (Lk 20:22). Learning that Jesus had escaped from the first two traps, the Sadducees, in our Gospel lesson for today, ask a question concerning the marital state after the resurrection. The challenge to Jesus is clear: do you believe in the written Torah which is silent on the resurrection or do you side with the Pharisees, accepting their belief in the resurrection based on oral traditions and interpretations, and thus subject Moses to ridicule?

The Pharisees were an entirely religious group with no political ambitions and were content with any government which gave them religious freedom. They accepted both the Torah and the Prophets as authoritative scripture, and relied heavily on oral tradition to understand scripture. They observed all the regulations and rules of the oral and ceremonial law. The Pharisees believed in and hoped for the coming of the Messiah. They believed also in the resurrection from the dead, in angels, spirits and fate, i.e., that a man's life was planned and ordered by God
The Sadducees constituted a party of wealth, power and privilege, who controlled the temple worship. They were the Jewish governing class, who supported the Roman rule. Nearly all priests were Sadducees. They accepted only the Torah as authoritative scripture, giving the writings of the prophets a lower place in their system and rejected oral tradition altogether. The Sadducees believed in unrestricted free-will and not in fate or providence, assuming that we control our own destinies through our proper actions. They rejected the idea of the resurrection; because it was not found in the Torah. Nor did they believe in the Messiah.

The trap: When the Sadducees saw that Jesus had silenced the emissaries of the Sanhedrin, they confronted him with a question ridiculing the belief in the resurrection of the dead about which, they claimed that Moses had written nothing. They invited Jesus to take a no-win political stance. If Jesus defended the concept of the resurrection, he would please the Pharisees. If he failed to do so, he would please the Sadducees. Either way, he would alienate a part of the crowd.

The offensive defense: Jesus begins his counter argument by pointing out their ignorance about the life after death with God and its nature. Marriage and family life are wonderful things, but what we will experience in heaven goes far beyond our wildest imagination. And there is no marriage or reproduction in heaven. Jesus then told the Sadducees (who denied angels and spirits) that those whom God considers worthy of the resurrection and heavenly life with Him are immortal, like the angels and hence “children of God.”
As a third counter argument Jesus uses the Sadducees' sacred text to respond to their anti-resurrection beliefs by citing a strong argument from the book of Exodus supporting the resurrection of the dead: God said to Moses from the burning bush, "I am the God of your Fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob" (Exo.3:1-6). God speaks about His relationship with them in the present tense as if they are still living six hundred years after their death. If the dead no longer exist, if they have become nothing, then God would be declaring: "I am the God of nothing. No wonder the scribes declared it to be a good answer, for Jesus had met the Sadducees on their own ground and defeated them by giving a basically Pharisaic answer to the Sadducee challenge.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church our belief in the resurrection is based upon a faith relationship with God as creator. Based on the Word of God, we trust that God who loves us now with his good gifts will care for us in the afterlife. Moreover, God has a plan for us that includes life after death. How do we know there is life after death? We know it through the Scriptures and the tradition of the Church. But more important than these, through God's dynamic presence, His love and compassion. We can trust God in all things, including death, our greatest challenge. If He lives, so shall we, for His love transcends all things, even death itself.

Messages: 1) Live the lives of the resurrection people: This means that we are not to lie buried in the tomb of our sins and evil habits, but instead, to live joyful and peaceful lives, constantly experiencing the real presence of the resurrected Lord who gives us the assurance that our bodies also will be resurrected. In addition, the hope of our resurrection and eternal life with God gives us lasting peace and celestial joy amid the boredom and tension of our day-to-day lives. The awareness of the all-pervading presence of the Spirit of the living God will help us to control our thoughts, desires, words and behavior. The salutary thought of our own resurrection and eternal glory also inspires us to honor our bodies, keeping them holy, pure and free from evil habits and to respect those with whom we come in to contact, rendering them loving and humble service.

As we continue our Eucharist celebration and gather around the table of the Lord, let us give thanks to the Almighty God for the foretaste of the Heavenly Banquet that waits us in the place that God has prepared for us.

God Is Not God of the Dead
Gospel Commentary for the 32rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

By Father Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap

ROME, NOV. 9, 2007 (Zenit.org).- In reply to the question that the Sadducees had posed to trap him about the woman who had had seven husbands on earth, Jesus above all reaffirms the fact of the resurrection, correcting at the same time the Sadducees' materialistic caricature of it.

Eternal beatitude is not just an increase and prolongation of terrestrial joys, the maximization of the pleasures of the flesh and the table. The other life is truly another life, a life of a different quality. It is true that it is the fulfillment of all man's longings on earth, yet it is infinitely more, on a different level. "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."

At the end of the Gospel passage, Jesus explains the reason why there must be life after death. "That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush, when he called out 'Lord, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,' and he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive." Where in that is the proof that the dead rise? If God is defined as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and is a God of the living, not of the dead, then this means that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive somewhere, even if they have been dead for centuries at the time that God talks to Moses.

Interpreting Jesus' answer to the Sadducees in an erroneous way, some have claimed that marriage has no follow-up in heaven. But with his reply Jesus rejects the caricature that the Sadducees present of heaven, a caricature that suggests that it is a simple continuation of the earthly relationships of the spouses. He does not deny that they might rediscover in God the bond that united them on earth.

Is it possible that a husband and wife, after a life that brought them into relation with God through the miracle of creation, will not in eternal life have anything more in common, as if all were forgotten, lost? Would this not be contrary to Jesus' word according to which that which God has united must not be divided? If God united them on earth, how could he divide them in heaven? Could an entire life spent together end in nothing without betraying the meaning of this present life, which is a preparation for the kingdom, the new heaven and the new earth?

It is Scripture itself, and not only the natural desire of the husband and wife, that supports this hope. Marriage, Scripture says, is "a great sacrament" because it symbolizes the union between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:32). Is it possible that it be eliminated in the heavenly Jerusalem, where there will be celebrated the eternal wedding feast of Christ and the Church of which the marriage of man and woman is an image?

According to this vision, matrimony does not entirely end with death but is transfigured, spiritualized -- it loses those limits that mark life on earth -- in the same way that the bonds between parents and children or between friends will not be forgotten. In the preface of the Mass for the dead, the liturgy says that with death "life is changed, not taken away"; the same must be said of marriage, which is an integral part of life.

But what about those who have had a negative experience of earthly marriage, an experience of misunderstanding and suffering? Should not this idea that the marital bond will not break at death be for them, rather than a consolation, a reason for fear? No, for in the passage from time to eternity the good remains and evil falls away. The love that united them, perhaps for only a brief time, remains; defects, misunderstandings, suffering that they inflicted on each other, will fall away. Many spouses will experience true love for each other only when they will be reunited "in God," and with this love there will be the joy and fullness of the union that they did not know on earth. This is also what happens to the love between Faust and Margaret in Goethe's story: "Only in heaven the unreachable -- that is, the total and pacific union between two creatures who love each other -- will become reality." In God all will be understood, all will be excused, all will be forgiven.

And what can be said about those who have been legitimately married to different people, widowers and widows who have remarried. (This was the case presented to Jesus of the seven brothers who successively had the same woman as their wife.) Even for them we must repeat the same thing: That which was truly love and self-surrender between each of the husbands or wives, being objectively a good coming from God, will not be dissolved. In heaven there will not be rivalry in love or jealousy. These things do not belong to true love but to the intrinsic limits of the creature.

[Translation by ZENIT]

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Father Raniero Cantalamessa is the Pontifical Household preacher. The readings for this Sunday are 2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14; 2 Thessalonians 2:15-3:5; Luke 20:27-38.

Anecdote: Resurrection: As Vice President, George Bush represented the U.S. at the funeral of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Bush was deeply moved by a silent protest carried out by Brezhnev's widow. She stood motionless by the coffin until seconds before it was closed. Then, just as the soldiers touched the lid, Brezhnev's wife performed an act of great courage and hope, a gesture that must surely rank as one of the most profound acts of civil disobedience ever committed: she reached down and made the sign of the cross on her husband's chest. There in the citadel of secular, atheistic power, the wife of the man who had run it all hoped that her husband was wrong. She hoped that there was another life, that that life was best represented by Jesus who died on the cross, and that the same Jesus might yet have mercy on her husband. (Gary Thomas, Christian Times, October 3, 1994, p. 26).