32nd Sunday - Fr. Leo
Throughout history there has been tension between divine law and human law. Divine law being what we believe is God’s truth and will, and human law being based on that incorporating the morays and societal norms for groups of people to be able to live together peacefully.
Because humans are the discerners there are constant errors as egos, civil and religious organizations claim for themselves, God’s truth as they see it. Our first reading is an example. Here is a mother who encourages her seven sons to die for their faith rather than embrace truth as defined by the king. The brothers possess an amazing faith in life after death. Each died believing the God of justice would raise them up.
In the gospel, Jesus is put in the middle of the law of institutional Judaism and the way of God beyond this life and our human understanding of it. The Sadducees try to entrap Jesus in their way of thinking. By religious law, a man who died childless was to have his brother raise up children with his wife. So when hypothetically all the brothers die, Jesus is asked who’s wife will she be?
Clever by their standards, they think they have trapped Jesus, as if Truth can be trapped. Jesus answers with a whole new perspective on how God operates and how life is experienced after death. By Jesus’ definition, we are children of God sharing in God’s love, not given in marriage to one or the other person. We will all be married to each other in Christ as we share in the fullness of God’s divinity through Christ in the Holy Spirit. We become one as God is one.
We are wise then, to live in this life with our eyes fixed on the next life in the fullness of God. It is then that we will have the faith to join the seven brothers who gave up everything, even their our own lives, to live fully in God. Let us pray then for the desire to possess faith in it’s fullness, so we may treasure the things of heaven and find our only happiness in God alone. Father, thy kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven. Amen!