The Question about the Resurrection

Today's Reflections

                                                  

 

     

The Question about the Resurrection 

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Mk 12:18-27

¹⁸Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to [Jesus] and put this question to him, ¹⁹saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us, ‘If someone’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, his brother must take the wife and raise up descendants for his brother.’ ²⁰Now there were seven brothers. The first married a woman and died, leaving no descendants. ²¹So the second married her and died, leaving no descendants, and the third likewise. ²²And the seven left no descendants. Last of all the woman also died. ²³At the resurrection [when they arise] whose wife will she be? For all seven had been married to her.” ²⁴Jesus said to them, “Are you not misled because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God? ²⁵When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but they are like the angels in heaven. ²⁶As for the dead being raised, have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God told him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, [the] God of Isaac, and [the] God of Jacob’? ²⁷He is not God of the dead but of the living. You are greatly misled.”

Reflection:

God of the living. In answering the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, Jesus puts himself on the side of those who believe that there will be a resurrection. That is also our belief as followers of Jesus. We profess in the Apostles’ Creed that we believe in the resurrection of the body.

The answer of Jesus tells us that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all still await the resurrection of the dead. If their life has been completely extinguished, God can no longer be called their God. Only the living can be said to have a God.

When I was traveling in northern Italy, I passed by a cemetery where the arch guarding the entrance had the word Resurrecturis (To those who will rise again) emblazoned on it. Only when we have risen from the dead will our redemption be complete.

Let us live as people

destined to die and rise again with Christ.