Wednesday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time
Mark 12:18-27

“‘He is not God of the dead but of the living.’”

In today’s Gospel passage, Our Lord tries to make clear to the Sadducees the meaning of the Resurrection.  St. Mark the Evangelist, at the start of the Gospel passage, explains that the Sadducees “say there is no resurrection”.  That might be hard for us to believe.  We might tend to think that the Jewish people, having already existed—in the days of Jesus—for many centuries as God’s Chosen People, would have been united in their beliefs.  But they were not.

Consider another passage of the New Testament.  Towards the end of the Acts of the Apostles (Chapter 23), St. Paul is on trial before the Jewish high council in Jerusalem for professing his faith in the Risen Jesus.  Among those before whom St. Paul stood, there were two different groups of Jewish leaders:  Pharisees and Sadducees.  The author of Acts explains that “the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection or angels or spirits, while the Pharisees acknowledge all three” [Acts 23:8].

Aware of this division among the Jewish leaders, St. Paul does something clever.  He boldly declares before both groups, “My brothers, I am a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees; [I] am on trial for hope in the resurrection of the dead.”  At that, a “great uproar occurred, and some scribes belonging to the Pharisee party stood up and sharply argued, ‘We find nothing wrong with this man. Suppose a spirit or an angel has spoken to him?’” [Acts 23:6,9].  With that the trial ended, though not St. Paul’s trials for being a Christian.  Eventually, as you know, he was martyred in Rome for his faith in the Risen Christ.

The point that connects to today’s Gospel Reading, however, is that in Jesus’ day, the Jewish people were not united in their beliefs.  Some rejected the notion of a resurrection altogether, and others—even if they professed it—were not clear in their understanding of the belief.

But given all that, we need to take the plank out of our own eye.  We as Christians believe in the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead on that original Easter Sunday morning.  We also believe in the hope of resurrection that God offers to all who die with faith in Christ.  Nonetheless, we still very likely do not fully appreciate and understand the beauty of the new life that is experienced by those raised from the dead.

In the four Gospel accounts, we never find Our Lord Jesus going into great detail about the nature of the afterlife.  There are two practical reasons for this.  First, the glory of Heaven is too far beyond our comprehension.  Second, our only hope for sharing in that glory is to persevere in running the race which God has set before us.  Jesus wants us to pay attention more to our spiritual “today” rather than the promise of “tomorrow”.  This is because we reach Heaven only if we put our faith into action.  We must today, in the here and now, stir into flame the gift of God each of us first received at our baptism.