The Resurrection of the Dead

Lk 20:27-38

The Question about the Resurrection

27Some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, came forward and put this question to [Jesus], 28saying, “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.’ 29Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman but died childless. 30Then the second 31and the third married her, and likewise all the seven died childless. 32Finally the woman also died. 33Now at the resurrection whose wife will that woman be? For all seven had been married to her.” 34Jesus said to them, “The children of this age marry and remarry; 35but 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. 36They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise. 37That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush, when he called ‘Lord’ the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; 38and he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”

Think of the Hereafter!

The Sadducees cannot imagine an afterlife (resurrection) because of the “chaos” it will incur. How will the situation of a woman who had been married to seven husbands be entangled? Whose wife will she be up there People keep on imagining: what’s heaven like?

The Bible tells us that we will be happy. We will recline at table in God’s kingdom with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets (Lk 13:28-29). There shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain (Rv 21:4). But how will we look like—young or old? What will our “world” be after the resurrection of the body?

Other people go the opposite direction. “Imagine there’s no heaven,” they say with the late John Lennon. Heaven simply distracts us from our responsibilities here below. Heaven is the religious “opium” that prevents people from destroying the shackles that condemn them to poverty, ignorance, and other situations that enslave.

As we draw close to the end of the liturgical year, we are reminded to raise our minds to what classic spirituality calls “the last things”: death, judgment, reward and punishment (purgatory, heaven, hell). These are the things that matter. What does it profit a human being, when at the end he loses his very soul?

The word of God today invites us to transcend worldly experiences and values. The Second Book of Maccabees makes explicit the Jewish belief in the resurrection. The seven brothers prefer death to displeasing God by abandoning their religious beliefs. They give up their lives with the hope in the resurrection to life—to be given only to the just. In the Gospel, Jesus sides with the Pharisees and the majority of the Jewish people who hold that there is life beyond the grave. God is the “God of the living.” Although the patriarchs, the prophets, and the just people may have died, God preserves the existence of his faithful ones so that they are truly alive in him. Human existence does not end with death—as the Sadducees hold.

The resurrection from the dead is at the heart of the Christian faith. The proof of this is Jesus’ own resurrection. St. Paul says that if there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then empty is the Christian faith (1 Cor 15:13-14). Christ’s resurrection is tied with the resurrection from the dead. And if Christ’s resurrection is but a figment of human imagination, we Christians are the most pitiable people of all. The hope to be someday with Christ is our everlasting encouragement to persevere in good deed and word (see Second Reading).

To be a Christian and not to believe in the afterlife is a contradiction. Obviously, the hope for the future life need not detract us from giving our contribution to building the kingdom of God here on earth by fighting poverty, corruption, and any situation that diminishes human dignity. And yet we cannot pretend or hope to build an earthly paradise, because paradise is destined for the next life.

“For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to come” (Heb 13:14).

Christ’s resurrection and the resultant resurrection from the dead are like directional arrows which point to us our target: the happiness of heaven. After our earthly life, eternity opens.