Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

When I was small, my three older brothers and I shared a shiny black two-wheeler bicycle. Gregg was eight, Rex and Scott were six,  I was the little sister. Gregg fit the bike well. My feet could barely reach the pedals. My dad had run behind me and taught me how to ride. I loved the freedom of rushing in the breeze. Except . . . I didn’t know how to stop. I would pedal up the driveway, ride into the grass, launch into the air and fling myself onto the lawn. It was a test of my agility. It was a test of my five-year-old courage. 

The Sadducees give Jesus a test. A woman shared seven brothers as husbands in this life (Lord have mercy!); when she dies, whose wife is she? It is a trial of mental acuity for the man they consider 

just a yokel from Galilee. Jesus cleverly flings their expectations into the air. He speaks of the freedom of heaven, like rushing in the breeze. There will be nothing to hold us back; we will be free among the living, to spend eternity praising God. 

The Greeks put seven Maccabean brothers to the test—would they eat pork and abandon their religion? Or would they refuse and die a horrible death? One after another, the brothers offered themselves to martyrdom. It was a test of spiritual fortitude. How firmly did they believe? Their mother, after watching her first six sons die, encouraged her youngest lad also to hurl himself toward resurrection. 

Life is full of tests, especially the final one. We pedal as hard as we can, but we are not in charge of the brakes. We don’t know when our lives will stop. Do we have the courage to trust in the resurrection?  Are we willing to launch into the air and fling ourselves into the arms of a loving God? 

Consider/Discuss 

• Many life experiences do not come with an instruction manual (and sometimes too many and conflicting ones)—the birth of a child, the loss of a spouse, the rebellion of a son or daughter, the moment of death. These are often bigger experiences than we know how to handle. What have you gone through in life that you’ve had to grow into? How did God walk with you through that? 
• Launching into the unknown can be filled with fear. We could get hurt.  Those we love could get hurt. What kind of unknowns are you stepping into right now? 

Living and Praying with the Word 

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, you are with us here, now,  surrounding us with your love. This day we ask you to handle this  test: ____________. Please take this trial and transform it. Give us the  strength to handle our lives. You are our strength. You are the source  of our fortitude. Take our troubles and surround us with your peace.  When we get to the final test of death and leap into the unknown,  give us the courage to fling ourselves into your loving arms.

The Second Book of Maccabees recounts the efforts of devout  Jews to oppose the Hellenist rulers who sought to undermine their adherence to their faith. One such ploy was to try to force them to eat pork; more than one Jew accepted death rather than disobey the Law at the command of secular rulers (6:18–31). Aside from its edifying tale of seven faithful brothers and their mother, the present passage gives us the clearest expression in the Old Testament of belief in bodily resurrection (along with Daniel 12:1–3). Hope that they would be raised up by God even if they died faithful to God allowed all seven sons to die excruciating deaths. Both fidelity and great hope are on display in these early tales of Jewish martyrs.

In the face of social disapproval, perhaps some civic persecution,  and the confusion and disturbance caused by the claim by some that the parousia has already occurred (a claim that, if true, would have to lead one to question everything that one had been taught, since nothing had changed in the world), Paul exhorts the Thessalonians to calm down, ignore the false claims, and remain steadfast.  Divine encouragement will strengthen them against the profound temptations to abandon the faith and their way of life in Christ. Paul too has his work to do, spreading the gospel as far as he can while he has time, in order to bring as many as possible to salvation. No matter what, they must remember a central claim of scripture: God is faithful. Just hold fast, keep steady, trust in what they have been taught, and above all, trust in God’s love. In this, as in all things, they should look to Christ as their model. 

The Sadducees were a Jewish group who rejected any doctrine not clearly taught in Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomy). Thus,  unlike the Pharisees, they did not believe in resurrection. They take the opportunity here to argue with Jesus about the question by trying a little reductio ad absurdum. The challenge they pose has to do with the institution known as levirate marriage, in which a brother of a deceased man was required to marry his widow if they had had no children. What if that same woman ended up marrying seven brothers? What a complete mess in the age to come! This is taken as an argument against resurrection. Jesus breezily dismisses it as misunderstanding the nature of the age to come. Since people will no longer die, there will be no need for marriage or to raise children.  Using an authoritative source they will acknowledge, he points out that God could hardly be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob centuries after they had left this earth if they were not in fact still alive to God.