Peace be with you. Friends, our first
reading and our gospel for this weekend
have a special resonance for our time I think,
because they both speak clearly about
life after death. Now I say it has
resonance for our time, because there's coming
more and more to be a dominant secularist
or materialist ideology that says, "All there is the world
that we can see and measure empirically. All there is
matter in motion. Big Bang happened. The world came into
being eventually it will pass out
of being. We live for a very
short time and then we die and our bodies go
back into the earth. The universe itself
will wind down." That's the materialist,
secularist view of the world. It might surprise
you to hear this. It surprises a lot
of religious people, but the view that
there is nothing after this life for us was actually
commonly held throughout much of the
Old Testament period. You look at the text
of the Old Testament, you'll find some
that begin to make a sort of tentative
reference of an afterlife or toward life
after death. But a lot of the
Old Testament, the standard view was
that death is the end and we go back
into the earth. When the Psalmist,
for example, praise to the Lord, "Well, can dust
give you praise?" The point he
is making is, "Well, yeah,
now that I'm alive, I can give you praise. But dust,
once I'm gone, I can't give you
any praise." Well, our reading,
the first reading for today is from the
second book of Maccabees and it's one of the
most extraordinary texts in the Old Testament
because it's one of the relatively few
Old Testament passages that clearly indicate
the existence of life after death. And the setting
is fascinating. So we're looking at
the second century, BC in Israel. A time when a Hellenizing
culture was trying to impose itself
upon Israel. So here I'm talking
about the cultural and political descendants
of Alexander The Great, now moved into this
part of the world, and they're trying to
impose upon conquered Israel, the sort of Greek
way of life. And much of that life,
we eventually took in and we've adopted
their Greek philosophy and so on and so forth. But at the time it
was seen by many in Israel as an affront. It was outrageous. It's interesting to me
that go up and down in the centuries, you'll find conquering
nations from ancient times to our own time
always think they're offering something good. That's why they want
to spread their empire around the world. And the ancient Greeks
were no different. They wanted to
Hellenize the world. But they met in Israel
with strenuous resistance. It was led by this
fellow Judas Maccabeus, hence the Maccabees books. Maccabeus just
means the hammer. So Judas and his brothers,
Judas and his family gathered a lot of
followers around them and they resisted this
Hellenizing influence. They took up arms
against the Greeks. Read the books
of Maccabees for all the details of
those battles. But that's the setting,
everybody, for the story that we
read in our first reading. And it's so remarkable. What's happened is this
mother and seven of her sons have been captured and they're being forced
to eat pork, which was against
a Jewish law. The hope probably was
that we get these people to give in, they'll cause
others to give in. That's the usual method
that conquerors use. If I can get some leaders
in the society to cave in, people will follow soon. So my guess is this woman
and her sons were prominent players. And so pressure is put
on them to give in. Well they don't. And what follows
is a horrific tale, as one by one in the
presence of their mother these sons are
put to death. But the speeches they
give before they die are magnificent and
they're at the heart of our reading. Here's what one says. "We are ready to die,
rather than to transgress the laws of
our ancestors." And then another son,
he puts out his hands, because the tortures
are threatening to cut off his limbs. He says, "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." Extraordinary isn't it.
He is about to die and he holds out his
own hands and says, "I disdain them out of
love for the law of God." But at the same time,
just as He gave them to me, I trust He will give
them back to me again. The last brother, just
before he die says this, "It is my choice to die
at the hands of men with the hope
that God gives of being raised up
again by Him." Again, this was
not a common view in the Old Testament, but here we see it
on vivid display. See, it's more than a
story of great courage. It is that of course and
we honor these people for their courage, but it's a story of great
theological significance, because of the
assertion of belief in life after death. Notice please, these
young men are not operating out of a sort
of puritanism or a dualism or a
Platonism that would say, "Sure, these bodies
are fallen and I'm eager to
get rid of them and I want to die so
I can go up to heaven." There's no disdaining
of the body in itself. In the early centuries
of the Church, we have gnostic heresy,
which said exactly that, that the body's
a kind of prison from which the soul
longs to escape. Well, that's not at all
what's animating these brothers.
No, no. They're offering their
hands and their tongues and cut their tongues out,
their limbs, their very bodies
in the hope that they will receive
them again. The risen life —see here's the
interesting point— the risen life
they're anticipating is not a purely
spiritual one, not Plato's fantasy of
a disembodied existence, rather it's one that
involves the body raised to a higher
pitch of perfection. I think everybody,
they're an awful lot of Christians who hold
to something that's more platonic than biblical. What I mean is they
tend to think of the afterlife as the soul
escaping from the body and going up to this
purely spiritual place called heaven. But see, that's not the
object of Christian hope. What do we hope for? Not a disembodied,
purely spiritual existence. We hope for the
resurrection of the body. Now in Christ's
resurrection from the dead, we see this now
on full display. But how wonderful
that in this story from Maccabees
it's anticipated. These seven brothers
are giving voice to this very deep hope, to a
truly resurrected life. Ok. Against that background —that's why the Church
gave us this reading as the first reading— because we're meant
now to look at our gospel in light of it. The setting is
a conversation, pretty heated
I imagine, between the Sadducees
and Jesus. Now who are
the Sadducees? Well, they were a kind of
a political religious party within Judaism and they had
a lot of characteristics, but one of their
characteristics was they —and again, to be fair
in line with the mainstream of a lot of the
Old Testament tradition— they did not believe
in life after death. Well, Jesus, —they can guess
from His preaching— does indeed believe
in the resurrection. And so they posed to Him
and they probably brought their most clever
people forward. It's like people today, having these political
debates online and someone catches
it on camera. Well it's that
kind of exchange. They propose what the logicians
call a Reductio ad absurdum. A reduction to the absurd. When you take your
opponent's position and say, "Well look,
if you hold to that and I push it now to
its logical extreme, I'm going to end up
with an absurdity." So the Sadducees posed
this famous case. There's this woman who marries a series
of seven brothers and each brother dies. Okay, so now
the woman dies and they go
to the afterlife. Well, whose wife is she? Who's her husband? She married all seven. Reductio ad absurdum. If you really believe in
this life after death, then how do you make sense
of this kind of situation? Well, Jesus is
having none of it. He declares clearly and
strongly His belief in life after death,
in the resurrection. And what's His
first evidence? Moses, so at the very heart
of the Old Testament speaks of God
as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and
the God of Jacob. God is not a God of dead,
but of the living. So by Moses' time,
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were long, long dead, and yet God has described
as being the God of these three men. How's that possible
unless in some sense these three men
are still alive? They're still alive in
the presence of God. How's He further
answer the Sadducees? In the heavenly realm, people will not marry
or be given in marriage. So He just cuts the dilemma
out from under its feet. But how come? Because marriage
is a bad thing? Because we can't wait
to get up beyond this world of bodies and sexuality
and marriage and go to a higher
spiritual space? No, no, no, no, because in the
heavenly realm, which is an embodied realm, Jews would never think
of it any other way. In heavenly realm,
we will love in a manner
so intense that it goes beyond
even this most intense expression
of love here below that we call marriage. Not that something
less than marriage is on display in heaven, but rather something much
greater than marriage. There'll be an intimacy
with one another that's possible because
we are so intimately joined to God and
through God to each other. So people will not marry
or be given in marriage, because something so much
greater than marriage is on display in heaven. Can I make a
final point here, everybody, as I close? Something you'll hear
from secularist and materialists today is, you religious people
that believe in heaven, a pie in the sky
when we die. You're the problem,
because it's all this fantasizing about another
world that leads you to ignore the injustices
and suffering of this world. See that is
consummate nonsense, because it's actually
the contrary. See, if you're a
strict materialist, so this is all there is,
this life, this body, which is going to die
and go back in the earth, the universe is
going to fade away. Why should I particularly
care about gross injustices that are halfway
across the globe? Oh, there's a poor kid
in Africa right now who's starving to death
and it's being caused by political corruption
and injustice. All right, he's
going to die. I'm going to die. We're all going to die. The universe is
going to fade away. So who cares? But now turn it around. You're a religious person and you believe in
life after death, you believe first of all,
that, that child suffering right now
in Africa, that starving child
was loved into existence by God and is destined
for eternal life with God. Mind you, not just his soul
that escapes from his body, but he himself, body
and soul is destined to live with God. Therefore, of course
I am interested in what's just and
right for him. Of course, I'm interested
in alleviating his suffering. It's not the religious
person that's indifferent. On the contrary. And then can I just
observe everybody, who were the greatest social activists
in the 20th century? Those that made the
biggest difference in terms of
social justice? People like Martin
Luther King, who believed in
life after death. People like John Paul II, who believed in
life after death. People like Mohandas
Gandhi in India, spiritual man that believed
in life after death. Don't bore me with this
canard that somehow religious people are
the ones indifferent to the suffering
of this world. On the contrary. It's those who believe as
those seven heroic brothers did in the Old Testament. Those who believe as Jesus
did in life after death, that are most committed
to justice here below. And God bless you.
