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10 Nov 2013 - Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

SOME SADDUCEES came up. This is the Jewish party that denies any possibility of resurrection. They asked, “Teacher, Moses wrote us that if a man dies and leaves a wife but no child, his brother is obligated to take the widow to wife and get her with child. Well, there once were seven brothers. The first took a wife. He died childless. The second married her and died, then the third, and eventually all seven had their turn, but no child. After all that, the wife died. That wife, now—in the resurrection whose wife is she? All seven married her.” Jesus said, “Marriage is a major preoccupation here, but not there. Those who are included in the resurrection of the dead will no longer be concerned with marriage nor, of course, with death. They will have better things to think about, if you can believe it. All ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God. Even Moses exclaimed about resurrection at the burning bush, saying, ‘God: God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob!’ God isn’t the God of dead men, but of the living. To him all are alive.” From New Message 4 Next Week (actapublications.com/newmessage4nextweek) based on The Message: Catholic/Ecumenical Edition by Eugene Peterson (ACTA Publications, 2013).

Resurrection sadducees

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Homily stories

07 Nov 2010 - Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

"When did you stop beating your wife?" So goes the trick question, designed so any answer you give will leave you embarrassed. Within the question is embedded a faulty assumption that you have, indeed, been beating your wife (or husband, dog, etc.). The Sadducees ask Jesus a trick question. They scorned those who believed in resurrection. They were so immersed in life as they currently experienced it on the physical level that they couldn't imagine how the concerns of this life might fade in a radically transformed life after death. If some of what we hear in the gospel doesn't make sense, perhaps it's because we're asking our questions in the wrong way.

Resurrection jesus sadducees

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06 Nov 2016 - Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

Some Sadducees came up. This is the Jewish party that denies any possibility of resurrection. They asked, “Teacher, Moses wrote us that if a man dies and leaves a wife but no child, his brother is obligated to take the widow to wife and get her with child. Well, there once were seven brothers. The first took a wife. He died childless. The second married her and died, then the third, and eventually all seven had their turn, but no child. After all that, the wife died. That wife, now—in the resurrection whose wife is she? All seven married her.” Jesus said, “Marriage is a major preoccupation here, but not there. Those who are included in the resurrection of the dead will no longer be concerned with marriage nor, of course, with death. They will have better things to think about, if you can believe it. All ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God. Even Moses exclaimed about resurrection at the burning bush, saying, ‘God: God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob!’ God isn’t the God of dead men, but of the living. To him all are alive.” From A New Message 4 Next Week (actapublications.com) based on The Message: Catholic/Ecumenical Edition by Eugene Peterson (ACTA Publications, 2013).

sadducees parable of the seven brothers

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Exploring the word

10 Nov 2019 - Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

Torture, mutilation, and execution are subjects most of us would prefer to avoid. Because we tend to stick to noble ideals in church—unconditional love, justice, peace, charity, morality, forgiveness—it is especially jarring to find a reading like this one from Maccabees assigned a public hearing. Though we live in a world where horrors exist, many of us might choose to keep these difficult facts out of the sanctuary. Isn’t that the meaning of the term “sanctuary”: a place where the danger of culpability can’t touch us? But the word of God rushes in to fill every available space in our world, just as it did when creating each molecule to begin with. And if ever there’s a space crying out for a living word to speak into it, it’s the place where innocence suffers and dies at the hands of humanly orchestrated evil. The story of the seven Hebrew martyrs in Maccabees is a tale of villainous outrage visited upon witnesses to integrity in the sight of heaven and earth. The horrendous details are hard to bear even in the telling some 21 centuries later. Yet the purpose of the story is to contain the vital purity of these young men’s heroic testimony: that God’s will is a higher authority than government, and heaven’s promises are more to be desired than mortal life itself. To these martyrs, it was clearly more than a matter of eating a piece of meat. Sovereignty was the issue: Which power is ultimately to be revered, the human or the divine? A word bearing glory Paul frames the idea in terms of glory when he tells the Thessalonians to be encouraged in every good word and deed. God’s holy word is “glorified” among those who keep the faith. Are there perverse and wicked doings about? Without question. What is the best way to hang onto hope and be preserved from the evil one in such a context? Stay close to the instructive, enduring, guiding word. But we misunderstand the word of God if we think nailing the Ten Commandments to the wall of every classroom and public building will do the trick. A word chiseled in stone is a dead word. A memorized list of chapters and verses or a Bible on every Christian coffee table isn’t going to save us. God’s word is alive, and a living word has to pierce the heart and become embedded in our flesh. If Jesus’ own example is any indication, a glorified word is first of all a vulnerable one, capable of passion and willing to accept it for the sake of testifying to the truth. Playing with matches Even pagan religions acknowledged fire as a gift of the gods and knew enough not to be careless with such a powerful vehicle of divine will. But the Sadducees seem quite willing to play with fire when they start their juggling act with the law of Moses in the presence of Jesus. Their hope is that he will be consumed by the conflagration of an unpopular answer. First, they toss Levirate law into the air: Every man must have his descendants, even if it takes a surviving male relative to father them. Next they add the story of seven brothers dying without heirs (awkwardly paired with the seven martyrs’ reading in the religious imagination of the lectionary organizers). The final element of their act is the teaching on the resurrection, something Sadducees have gone on record as denouncing. This is what ignites the game and what they hope will lead to Jesus’ credibility going up in flames. Little do they realize that their own authority has just caught on fire unawares. Levirate law was too unpopular to touch—just read any story from Hebrew scripture about how reluctant men were to spend time with their dead relative’s wives. Such unions even seemed to acquire the aura of a fatal attraction, as in the story of Tamar in Genesis or Sarah in Tobit. Jesus, for his part, sidesteps the issue totally when he dismisses marriage as a temporal reality that has no corollary in the world to come. But then he pushes through the same door the Sadducees unwittingly opened and moves into a teaching on the nature of angelic spirits and rising from the dead, subjects the religious leaders find abhorrent. No wonder the scribes who were present declared, “Teacher, you have answered well.” And the rest of the leaders don’t dare to pose another question. Applying the word Serious words Why did the Sadducees wind up standing there before Jesus like the coyote in the Warner Bros. cartoon, burned to a crisp by their own devices? Because they underestimated the power of the divine word to achieve its end, which is the proclamation of the truth. As preachers, we dare not make that same mistake. The word of God is not a game to be played in order to win at some agenda. This holy and powerful word is the force behind creation, made flesh in the person of Jesus, rendered as testimony by martyrs, and continues to speak truth to power in every age. If we use it for any other reason—to score points in an argument, to control people, to consolidate our authority, or to intimidate and shame—then we are no better than the devil who used scripture to similar ends once in a desert conversation with Jesus. And we will prove to be as successful as the Sadducees at that game, left holding the match as they smolder in disbelief. Does this make us feel cautious? I hope so. Perhaps the safest employment of the word is to allow it to speak into our lives and to stay humbly behind it like Saint Paul, who only testified to his experience and never to what he had not already lived. Related scripture links God’s word is alive: Heb. 4:12 A word made flesh: Jer. 31:33; Ezek. 36:26-27; John 1:14; Heb. 10:16 The hour of glory: John 12:23, 27-32 Levirate law: Deut. 25:5-10; Ruth 3:1-4:17 The unpopularity of Levirate law: Gen. 38:6-26; Tob. 6:11-8:18

Authors Alice Camille

word of god sadducees

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10 Nov 2019 - Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

Some Sadducees came up. This is the Jewish party that denies any possibility of resurrection. They asked, “Teacher, Moses wrote us that if a man dies and leaves a wife but no child, his brother is obligated to take the widow to wife and get her with child. Well, there once were seven brothers. The first took a wife. He died childless. The second married her and died, then the third, and eventually all seven had their turn, but no child. After all that, the wife died. That wife, now—in the resurrection whose wife is she? All seven married her.” Jesus said, “Marriage is a major preoccupation here, but not there. Those who are included in the resurrection of the dead will no longer be concerned with marriage nor, of course, with death. They will have better things to think about, if you can believe it. All ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God. Even Moses exclaimed about resurrection at the burning bush, saying, ‘God: God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob!’ God isn’t the God of dead men, but of the living. To him all are alive” (from Luke 20). From A New Message 4 Next Week (actapublications.com) based on The Message: Catholic/Ecumenical Edition by Eugene Peterson (ACTA Publications, 2013).

sadducees

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