First Reading
2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14
It happened that seven brothers with their mother were arrested and tortured with whips and scourges by the king, to force them to eat pork in violation of God’s law. One of the brothers, speaking for the others, said: “What do you expect to achieve by questioning us? We are ready to die rather than transgress the laws of our ancestors.” At the point of death he said: “You accursed fiend, you are depriving us of this present life, but the King of the world will raise us up to live again forever. It is for his laws that we are dying.” After him the third suffered their cruel sport. He put out his tongue at once when told to do so, and bravely held out his hands, as he spoke these noble words: “It was from Heaven that I received these; for the sake of his laws I disdain them; from him I hope to receive them again.” Even the king and his attendants marveled at the young man’s courage, because he regarded his sufferings as nothing. After he had died, they tortured and maltreated the fourth brother in the same way. When he was near death, he said, “It is my choice to die at the hands of men with the hope God gives of being raised up by him; but for you, there will be no resurrection to life.”
Second Reading
2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:52
Brothers and sisters: May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who has loved us and given us everlasting encouragement and good hope through his grace, encourage your hearts and strengthen them in every good deed and word. Finally, brothers and sisters, pray for us, so that the word of the Lord may speed forward and be glorified, as it did among you, and that we may be delivered from perverse and wicked people, for not all have faith. But the Lord is faithful; he will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one. We are confident of you in the Lord that what we instruct you, you are doing and will continue to do. May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the endurance of Christ.
Gospel Cycle Cycle C
Luke 20:27-38
Some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, came forward and put this question to Jesus, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us, If someone’s brother dies leaving a wife but no child, his brother must take the wife and raise up descendants for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman but died childless. Then the second and the third married her, and likewise all the seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. Now at the resurrection whose wife will that woman be? For all seven had been married to her.” Jesus said to them, “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. 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.”
We are coming to the end of Ordinary Time, the end of the Church Year. Soon we shall be starting with Advent once more. The readings today are really about the resurrection, about a belief in life after our death in this life. The First Reading from the Second Book of Maccabees is so clear in this passage: we are able to face any type of death because we have no fear of death in this life. Death in this life is only the gate to life eternal with God.
Our whole Christian tradition insists that there is a personal life after death for each one of us who believes. We do not have a tradition in which we die and simply disappear into the unity of God. No, we Christians believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. This has been a consistent written tradition going back to the great saints around and slightly before the year 400 AD.
As in todays Gospel from Saint Luke, we can find all kinds of disagreements with this faith and people who try to show that we must be crazy or unreasonable to believe. Jesus, however, in the Gospel, is very clear that God is a God of the living and not of the dead. All who believe are alive in Him.
How often people can say that it would be impossible for God to know the many billions of people who have lived and are living! This only shows our tendency to reduce God down to a sort of enhanced human. God is God. God knows all things at all times and lives beyond all time. God is the God of all that is and is the ground of all being and cause of all being. If we could encompass God with our human minds, God would not be God. We can have some understanding of God, but that understanding is always a dim reflection of the reality of God.
The Second Reading, from the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, asks that the Lord may direct our hearts to the love of God and to the endurance of Christ. Only as we plunge into the love of God can we come to understand a bit the endurance of Christ and His love for us. This is the reality of God. As we come to the end of the Church year, we are invited more and more to believe in all that God has taught us in Jesus Christ and to live as He lived in this world.
In coming to know the love of God, we can believe entirely in the resurrection of the dead and the love that God has for each one of us, individually and personally.