Richard Bollman, S.J.
32nd SUNDAY C – 2007
On the SCRIPTURE: 2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14; Luke 20:27-38
Today’s Gospel occurs soon after Palm Sunday during holy week.
It is one of those controversies
between Jesus and the religious factions of his time.
These happen in the temple area after he enters Jerusalem
and where he intervenes in the ordinary business of the temple,
throwing out the animal sellers, shutting it down.
Clearly Jesus is a person to be reckoned with.
Today’s religious debate concerns the resurrection,
not the resurrection of Jesus, but the resurrection of all of us,
which was a rather recent innovation in Jewish thought.
The more conservative elements, the Saducees,
stood sides against the idea, since Moses did not teach it.
Many Pharisees believed it to be a possible development of dogma.
There are hints of personal resurrection in the Old Testament.
The famous passage about the dry bones coming to life again
suggests a resurrection faith.
The clearest example of resurrection faith in the Old Testament
comes in the Book of Maccabees,
which is proclaimed first in today’s liturgy.
It is a horrific scene, a good example of terrorism,
several brothers being put to death
for not following the mandates of a pagan conqueror.
As they face death, they declare an explicit faith
that the sovereign of the universe will raise them up again
and restore their dismembered limbs: a resurrection to full life.
This is a recent book in the tradition,
telling events hardly 200 years before Jesus.
The Saducees would give it no authority at all.
But it does express the kind of resurrection faith
that was gaining some ground among Jewish believers.
HOMILY. "Daughters and Sons in the Resurrection"
It’s easy to get the point of this little debate.
The opponents of resurrection create a case to make it all seem absurd.
Who wants to spend eternity with several husbands?
But Jesus affirms that the new life of the resurrection
is not going to be a simple reiteration
of our current affairs and relationships.
In the age to come, there is no marriage
because there is no need to be starting a new family,
taking care of children of your own or begetting them for your brother,
since that whole plan is now complete and ended.
A new family has begun: God makes us to be all sons and daughters,
God’s children, God’s adult children, equal inheritors.
At first this seems to be a minor issue: who really cares about such details.
We all believe in the resurrection and that’s the key thing.
But what do we really believe? What do we expect?
I have been bumping into this question all through these past two months,
funeral after funeral.
What happens after those last breaths are taken?
Then yesterday I visited the cemetery.
My nephew mentioned in an email
that my sister’s grave marker was in place,
you know, the flat bronze markers they use at Gate of Heaven.
I went out to see it. And I was surprised to see, under her name, the words:
"dear wife, mom, and grandma."
I smiled, recognizing my sister and her family’s love for her,
her husband, her children, her grandchildren. That was surely her life.
And then, thought leading to thought, I smiled again:
clearly the grave marker was written without her two brothers in mind,
or her cousins, or her parents for that matter.
I thought of her name again:
"dear daughter, sister, cousin; good friend."
Well, you can’t say everything in an epitaph on bronze.
Maybe I wish that a lot less had been said at all.
But you see this is exactly the musing of the Saducee party:
"in the resurrection, who will she be?"
Are all of those relationships intact? Are we reunited as extended families?
Jesus declares that all this is quite secondary, just part of the past,
not part of the risen life.
In the risen life we are in a new relationship to each other:
all of us brothers and sisters, inheritors, of the one God.
So we live as sisters and brothers of Jesus.
Sisters and brothers of our own parents, do you see?
We will share a new kind of truth with one another,
and it will overshadow any of the relationships we are now caught up in.
That could be a very good thing, very freeding..
I’m always moved by the closing moments in the film "Field of Dreams,"
you know, where the ball players return to play on a field in Iowa
because this young farmer has faith in their reappearance.
And finally he meets his own father, as a young man in his twenties,
and they toss ball together, as equals.
That is such a moment of reconciliation, acceptance, and risen joy.
I’d like that, instead of any re-enactment of old times.
That is our destiny, and St. Paul takes for granted in today’s letter,
how we have been chosen from the beginning for this,
and that we are being delivered from a deceitful and oppressive system,
all the old tribal laws and the dictates of emporers,
to become a new kind of people, guided and taught by Christ.
This is what it means to be saved, it’s a community event.
to have this new kind of community life,
where we are (as he says in another place)
"neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female even."
Those are all power relationships, who’s up, who’s down.
But our calling is toward a shared existence where all are empowered,
instead of some of us being in charge
and the others just following directions.
Now that is an aspect of resurrection that becomes very important
because, you see, this risen life in Jesus
in some sense already begins here on earth,
where the Kingdom is among us, as Jesus insisted.
He was always placing us in this new reality,
even though the world was not ready.
The world order around us creates classes of people, the rich and the hungry,
the aristocrats and the marginal.
None of this is acceptable to the children of the resurrection.
Commentators point out that the Saducees themselves
were an aristocratic elite, traditionalists, people who steered the religion,
and their objections to the resurrection may have had
social and political overtones. It’s too revolutionary.
How daring then, of Jesus, to finish his argument
with a reference to the Book of Exodus,
to words of God that the great teacher Moses heard
and reported to the people.
God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob:
a God of the living. God declares that continuity.
They are alive to God. And God reveals this just at the moment
he sends Moses to call the slaves of Egypt into a pilgrimage to freedom.
It’s the most sacred encounter of the whole Old Testament,
and how delicious is Jesus’ irony in referring to it casually as
"the passage about the bush." (Wake up, you Saducees!)
The children of the resurrection, Moses might have said,
are about to be born right here among us,
by this action of the God of the Living!
We too live in this hope of liberation.
That’s what makes us a resurrection people.
We don’t see this glorious restored community of brothers and sisters
because so much inequity and death stands in the way.
But even so, we live in hope,
not just a hope for ourselves someday in the future after death.
But a hope that the stirring of God’s power goes on even now.
Who knows what is happening even now? In solidarity with everybody?
Immigrants, the homeless, terrorists, refugees.
A speaker I heard recently pointed out how no one knew
to expect the fall of the Berlin wall
or an end to apartheid, or the peace accords in Northern Ireland,
things that seemed as impossible as a settlement
between Israel and Palestine.
These things happened because some people, not all that many,
decided to live out of Hope, and imagination.
They talked these things through and wouldn’t let it die,
even went to death for the cause.
People who trust that God is God of the living,
and God is at work in the living,
directing hearts to confidence in Christ the first born from the dead.
So it is as this year ends, and as life ends for many of our parish and friends,
our faith directs us to appreciate the life in our mutual presence here,
sisters and brothers of Christ, inheritors of the one God.
The question to ponder is not what happens after the last breath,
but what happens next while we are all still breathing:
who are we with, what do we hope for,
how are we being inspired and called.
We need to take the next right steps
toward the dangerous truth of who we’re called to be.
A resurrection community, gathered already in power with Christ.