Reflections

Sunday’s Gospel, Week 32, Year C

07 November 2010

Luke 20:27-38

Clever argument challenges Jesus as he arrives in Jerusalem at the end of his journey in this Sunday’s Gospel, finding himself once again confronted by the religious powers of the various Jewish schools of thought, vying to maintain their influence in the face of his compelling and authoritative new teaching. 

The encounter with the Sadducees, as told in Luke 20:27-38, a faction of Jews who adhered strictly to the Torah - the five books of the scriptures attributed to Moses - and did not believe in the resurrection which was to be a later development in Jewish doctrine, provides an important opportunity for Jesus to witness to the life to come and to challenge in turn their entrenched attitudes on matters of faith.

The Sadducees’ apparent reverence for Jesus gives way to facile, closed debate: “Master, Moses prescribed for us, if a man’s married brother dies childless, the man must marry the widow to raise up children for his brother.  Well then, there were seven brothers; the first, having married a wife, died childless. The second and then the third married the widow.  And the same with all seven, they died leaving no children.  Finally the woman herself died.  Now, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be, since she had been married to all seven?” 

It is a question that is clearly designed to outwit Jesus and to prove his belief in the resurrection absurd, but the answer the Sadducees receive comes from a place of wisdom in Jesus that moves the exchange onto a whole new level.  “The children of this world take wives and husbands, but those who are judged worthy of a place in the other world and in the resurrection from the dead do not marry because they can no longer die, for they are the same as the angels, and being children of the resurrection they are children of God.”

Perhaps we ourselves as Christians today are challenged in many ways by clever argument on matters of faith as Jesus was and can learn from his courageously contemplative response; there is an atmosphere of stillness enveloping his reply that contrasts with the noise of the Sadducees’ thinking and points beyond life as we know it. 

The Sadducees can also represent parts of ourselves that continue to question and struggle with aspects of our own faith, seeking a place of certainty and desiring completeness in our search for the truth.  But the knowing of Jesus, that vision that he reveals to us in the Gospels is a different kind of knowing.  This Sunday’s Gospel can show us our own need to surrender further in trust with our questions, striving to listen with increasing obedience to the Holy Spirit in our prayer and in Lectio Divina, as we seek to find God in the events of our lives.

“Listen with the ear of your heart”

St Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries, Prologue

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