32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – Beyond Status

“Some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, came forward. Jesus said to them, ‘The children of this age marry and remarry; but 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. 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. 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’”
(Luke 20:27, 34-38).
 
Who were the Sadducees? They were Jews who took a different view from other Jewish groups of what constituted the Law. They adhered strictly to the written Law, believing only the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, were legitimately God’s Word. Thus, they firmly refused to believe in the resurrection of the body nor in the immortality of the soul, neither of which is mentioned in the Torah. Politically, they were an aristocratic group with ties to the Romans, the rich, and the priests of Jerusalem who controlled the Temple, the center of Jewish religious practice. They enjoyed the respect of both the rich and poor.
 
The arrival of Jesus threatens their status. Huge crowds are following Jesus, listening to him preach about the kingdom of God, some extraordinary place where the last will be first, and the rich will struggle to get in.
 
These Sadducees presume a completely different idea of “eternal life,” one common in ancient societies and perhaps still present today. To live forever in any sense at all, you must accomplish great things, involving wealth or power, so people will remember and talk about you long after you’re gone. Better yet, have children who can preserve your blood line, take care of your amassed estate, and remind everyone not to forget you.
 
This is the assumption that Jesus challenges, distinguishing between “this age” and “the coming age.”
 
In this age people marry and work to become wealthy for status and bring forth children to preserve and inherit that status, but in the life of the resurrection none of that happens because none of that matters. Everyone—as we have consistently heard from Luke—is worthy to be a “child of the resurrection,” is a child of God, and there is no status greater than that.
 
– Where do you see evidence of the Sadducees’ notion of “eternal life” at work in the world today?
 
Adapted from Word on the Go, a downloadable resource from RENEW International.