3 June 2020
Memorial of Saint Charles Lwanga and Companions, Martyrs
Jesus is confronted by yet another group, the Sadducees, notable for not believing in the resurrection of the dead. They seek to trap Jesus, for one of the central messages of His teaching is just such a resurrection. But they assume that the resurrection is simply a restoration of all things; that the resurrection Jesus preaches is simply God promising to put back together everything that was broken: they have no notion of glory. “Are you misled because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?” Jesus says to them. How narrow is their understanding! They believe that a God capable of raising the dead is capable of this and nothing more, yet when has it ever been the case that God touches anything and it remains just as it always was?
Just as yesterday Jesus sought to teach the Pharisees and Herodians the truth that all people belong to God, as it is His image which is imprinted upon our very beings, so the hypothetical woman in the case brought up by the Sadducees belongs not to any of her seven husbands in the resurrection, but to God alone, for those who are raised from the dead “…neither marry nor are given in marriage, but they are like the angels in heaven…” who are dedicated solely to God. For to rise from the dead means you are redeemed, free of all sin and earthly attachment, purified such that you “…love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength…” (Mark 12:30). We might resist this momentarily, especially if we are married and love our spouses deeply. Yet we must recall our vows, which bind us in love to one another until death; as we hear in the Marriage Rite “…what God has joined, no one must separate…” The love of man and wife, joined by God, is oriented to God: it begins and ends in Him. Yet this is lost on the Sadducees, who see marriage as merely a legal contract, rather than a relationship that symbolizes and seeks to imitate the loving bond between God and His people, and even God and each individual soul. Indeed when God poured out His Spirit upon His Church at Pentecost He was saying not in words but with Love Himself “I am yours, and you are mine,”to which the Church has even responded, in the words of the woman in the Song of Songs, “I belong to my lover, and my lover belongs to me…” (Song of Songs 6:3).
The Sadducees do not simply misunderstand the love of God, but His very identity as the God of the Living; they forget the beautiful truth in the Song of Songs which says “…Love is strong as Death…” (Song of Songs 8:6). How can God truly be God if, in death, He loses us? If death somehow releases us from His lordship? If He is our God only while we live, and then He is no longer? The Sadducees are indeed misled! For as Jesus says “He is not God of the dead but of the living,” as in Him death has no power. As St. Paul would later write “What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? …No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” (Romans 8:35, 37-39). The Sadducees do not believe in a God who loves them, Whose love is more powerful even than death. Their relationship with God is similar to their view on marriage: it is contractual, legal, and last until “death do us part.”
Jesus, however, comes to reveal something they cannot comprehend: a God Whose love for His people is everlasting, even through and beyond death. That, brothers and sisters, is our God.