Fr. Michael Williams

As believers in the Lord we say each week in the Creed, ‘We believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting’. If we did not believe this we would not bother coming to Mass each Sunday, which is the Lord’s Day. By attending Mass we are witnessing to the Lord’s resurrection; His victory over sin and death; we are witnessing to another world beyond this one.

The Sadducees were a group of men, who lived during the time of Jesus, ‘who said that there is no resurrection’. They believed that once a human being had died, then that was the end of that person. In today’s world many people say much the same thing, they also say ‘that there is no resurrection’ and so don’t give a thought to God and the afterlife. Jesus taught that there is an afterlife, where men and women transcend the limits of this world, and become ‘the same as the angels’.

Jesus taught that the Son of Man, ‘is destined…to be put to death, but to be raised up on the third day’ (Luke 9:22ff). In other words Jesus prophesises that He will overcome death and the limits of this world. In St Luke’s gospel He also says that the blessed ‘will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous’; and in St John’s gospel Jesus says something similar, ‘those who have done good [will go] to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil [will go] to the resurrection of condemnation’. So Jesus is clear throughout the gospels in saying that death is not the end and that there is a resurrection.

The Sadducees, and their modern day counterparts, think only with a worldly mentality. They try to invent clever stories and myths to discredit the truth that Jesus teaches. They were doing it two thousand years ago, and they are doing it today. But the truth that Jesus teaches is unchanging and eternal. In today’s gospel the Sadducees try to catch Jesus out with a clever story about a woman who marries someone, who then dies, so she marries another man, who then dies, and so on, until she has married seven men altogether. The Sadducees ask the question, ‘at the resurrection, to which of them will she be wife since she had been married to all seven’?

Jesus attempts to expand the narrow and worldly approach of the Sadducees, and those like them; He tries to get them to think on a more spiritual level. He says, ‘those who are judged worthy of a place in the other world and in the resurrection from the dead do not marry…for they are the same as the angels, and being children of the resurrection they are sons of God’. Jesus is explaining that there is a mystery involved here that ‘does not pertain to rationality, but to revelation’. St Paul expresses it well when he says Heaven is, ‘what no eye has seen and no ear has heard, what the mind of man cannot visualise; all that God has prepared for those who love Him’.

As followers of Christ we too can attempt to narrow and limit God’s ways. Peter once rebuked Jesus for saying that the Christ would ‘suffer grievously’. Jesus in turn rebuked Peter saying, ‘You are thinking not as God thinks but as human beings do’! We can all be tempted into thinking in worldly, unspiritual ways. Standing on the KOP on Tuesday night, when Liverpool scored goal number eight, I thought this is like Heaven. But obviously its not, Heaven is far beyond any earthly experience. And this is the point Jesus is making to the Sadducees. The Resurrection and heaven are far beyond any good earthly experiences, whether that be marriage or Liverpool winning 8-0.

Let’s pray that will always have faith in the words of the Son of God, who came to bring us life, life in abundance, the life of Resurrection.