A Lectio Divina Approach to the Sunday Liturgy
BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD (# 50)
32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – November 7, 2004
“The God of the Living”
BIBLE READINGS
2 Mc 7:1-2, 9-14 // 2 Thes 2:16-3:5 // Lk 20:27-38
I. BIBLICO-LITURGICAL REFLECTIONS
This story took place in Italy. Our friend’s elderly father died of a massive stroke. The disconsolate widow was crying her heart out at the funeral. The daughter gently reminded the grieving mother that the separation was temporary for she would be reunited with him in heaven. The mother cried even more and retorted: “Have you not heard what the Gospel says: in the next life we will be like angels and there will be no such thing as marriage? In heaven, I will no longer be his wife.” As her mother sobbed uncontrollably, our friend was speechless. She later confided to us, “I really did not know what to say.” Of course, the widow’s fear of cessation of the relationship is unfounded. True love never ends. What is clear in this story, however, is the Christian belief in eternal life, a faith reality that surpasses human understanding.
This Sunday’s Gospel passage introduces us to the Sadducees, a group of religious leaders who denied the existence of resurrected life and were bent on engaging Jesus in a reductio-ad-absurdum argument against the later doctrine of bodily resurrection. The biblical scholar, Samuel Oyin Abogunrin writes: “The Sadducees are mentioned for the first and last time here in Luke. They come with a mocking question intended to ridicule the teaching of Jesus, particularly on the resurrection. They therefore cite a hypothetical story framed in terms of the customs of the period. The Law prescribed that if a man died childless the husband’s brother would take the widow into his family (Dt 25:5-6). This is known as the levirate law (from levir, “husband’s brother”). For the Sadducees the levirate law made belief in the resurrection ridiculous because if there is resurrection there would be struggles in heaven over women inherited by brothers. We know very little about the Sadducees from original sources. The scanty information that we have about them comes from the writings of their opponents. According to these sources they were a conservative aristocratic party, mainly from the priestly class … They accepted only the five books of Moses as Scripture and denied the doctrine of afterlife, with its rewards and punishments beyond the grave, because they did not believe it was taught in the Torah.”
Jesus’ first rebuttal to the reductio-ad-absurdum argument of the scheming Sadducees also used a reductio-ad-absurdum tactic. The Divine Master argued that the next existence, which has no place for death, makes marriage and remarriage irrelevant. He reduced to pieces the basic premise of the Sadducees that the life of the age to come is a continuation of this life and therefore needs human propagation lest it die out.
Harold Buetow explains: “In the first part of Jesus’ answer, he took the opportunity to give a deeper understanding of the nature of resurrected life. He said that we shouldn’t speculate about the other side of the grave in terms of this earth. Life there is quite different. The resurrected life, for example, is the life of a completed human person, no longer defined in marital or generative terms. In the resurrected life, we’re not just resuscitated, but resurrected – not the kind of life we have here, but rather a life fulfilled on a wholly other plane.”
Those who are resurrected are no longer liable to death. According to Jesus: “They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise” (Lk 20:36). The French writer P. Claudel asserts that in the resurrection we become a person with a wholly illuminated soul. Here is his beautiful insight on the future, resurrected life: “Life is changed, not merely restored. It is not enough to say that what was most characteristic and essential is reestablished. You know that in the lives of those we love there are moments when they seem to be more themselves, when what is best in them comes through; such moments we love to remember. In these moments they are closer to being children of God, realizing more nearly the ideal that the heavenly Father had in calling them to existence. Thus it may be permitted to us to suppose that the future life, which our Lord describes as a clarification, will be that of a person with a wholly illuminated soul. Revelation tells us that our tears will be wiped away. But it is not only tears that will be wiped away, but everything in us that obscures – the temporal, the foreign, the profane, evil – and prevents us from experiencing only knowledge, love, good will, light, and perfume. We will be cleansed from head to toe like a little child taking a bath, carefully wiped clean.”
The second rebuttal of Jesus was derived from the Torah. Since the Sadducees held only to the Law of Moses, Jesus utilized that to bolster his argument about the resurrection life: “That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush, when he called out ‘Lord’, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive” (Lk 20:38-39). Samuel Oyin Abogunrin elucidates: “The opponents of the resurrection have quoted the Torah to justify their case, but Jesus also quotes the Torah (Ex 3:6) to prove that death does not write finis to human existence. When God says: “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” this implies that God’s relationship with these patriarchs is everlasting and personal. Abraham was God’s friend. While human beings may lose friends by death, God does not. It therefore follows that the dead are living and will one day share in the resurrection life that the Messiah will inaugurate. The main object of human existence is to live for God and God’s glory. That is why the faithful must live on after the brief span of human life and this will be made possible through the resurrection.”
It is through the resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God, that we are brought to true and eternal life. Our belief in our resurrection is based on our faith in the resurrected Christ. According to Harold Buetow: “Christian belief in immortality, on the other hand, is unique and special. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the Good News of fullness of life in this age, and of the resurrection in the age to come. For us death is a door, not a wall – not a wall that ends growth and action like the Berlin wall, but a door into a Christmas-tree room full of surprises. Someone has compared death to standing on the seashore. A ship spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the open sea. She fades on the horizon, and some one says, ‘She’s gone.’ Just at the moment when someone says, ‘She’s gone’, other voices who are watching at her coming on another shore happily shout, ‘Here she comes’. Or to use another metaphor, what the caterpillar calls ‘the end’, the butterfly calls the ‘beginning’.”
The Christian faith in the God of the living leads to a liturgical confession in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. The community of believers live for God in the here and now, and look forward to the new age to come when their entire selves will be transformed, body and soul. Harold Buetow concludes: “When in the moment we say the last line of the Creed, We believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting, we’re asserting our belief that, in a way that no one fully understands, at our resurrection our body joins with our spirit to continue our existence in eternal life. So our body as well as our spirit is holy, and for both of them this life isn’t all there is.
II. POINTS FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THE HEART
A. What is our concept of death and dying? Is this concept illumined by faith in the living God, in whom all are alive?
B. Do we believe that our future resurrected life will be that of “a person with a wholly illuminated soul” – when we are closer to being children of God and able to respond to the divine loving plan for each of us?
C. How authentic is our liturgical confession: We believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting? How does this eschatological belief affect our daily living here and now?
III. PRAYING WITH THE WORD
Leader: Loving Father,
you are the God of the living,
not of the dead.
In Jesus, your Son and our Savior,
we live and move.
We love you and your only begotten Son
for he is the way to eternal life.
He is the healing light that dispels the evil darkness
that obscures our filial relationship with you.
Help us to look forward to the resurrected life,
when all that is best in us will come through
and each of us will become
“a person with a wholly illuminated soul”.
Through our faith in Jesus, the risen Lord,
we will rise to new life
and share in your everlasting happiness.
We believe that death
is a door to our beautiful eternal destiny,
not the end of life and the promise of glory.
We proclaim in the great assembly
and in our life of service to the poor and needy
that you are indeed the font of life.
We believe in the resurrection of the body
and life everlasting.
May the Risen Christ whom we celebrate in every Eucharist
bring about more and more
our own resurrection and transformation.
In our work for justice and truth in today’s wounded world,
may we always give you glory and praise,
now and forever.
Assembly: Amen.
IV. INTERIORIZATION OF THE WORD
The following is the bread of the living Word that will nourish us throughout the week. Please memorize it.
“He is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.” (Lk 20:38)
V. TOWARDS LIFE TRANSFORMATION
A. ACTION PLAN: Pray for widows/widowers who have lost their partners and are grieving for them. Pray for the grace of a happy death and a deeper experience of trust in Jesus’ almighty Father, the God of the living.
B. ACTION PLAN: In the month of November, visit a cemetery. As you pray for the repose of the soul of the beloved dead, thank God for being the God of the living, and not God of the dead.
Prepared by Sr. Mary Margaret Tapang PDDM
SISTER DISCIPLES OF THE DIVINE MASTER
60 Sunset Ave., Staten Island, NY 10314
Tel. (718) 494-8597 // (718) 761-2323
Website: WWW.PDDM.US