The Gospel of Luke, chapter 20:38

In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 20, Jesus is questioned by the Sadducees who did not believe in the Resurrection. The Sadducees proposed a clever riddle about the possibility of a woman having seven legitimate husbands in order to discredit the idea of the Resurrection. These scholars of the law argued that there could be no Resurrection after death since the idea would violate God’s law of monogamous marriage.

Jesus marshalled the whole truth of the scriptures against these petty arguments of the Sadducees, and he quoted Moses who was able to address God in the most personal and down-to-earth way as “the God of Abraham, the God Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” He makes it clear that God is a God of the living and that, in the Resurrection, there is neither “marriage” nor are people “given in marriage.” The Sadducees were caught in a sticky wicket of their own making, and they knew it. They fell silent and did not dare to ask Him any more questions.

The Resurrection, which means new life, is the hope of all who live and die in the Lord. Jesus is the Resurrection and the life, and all who follow him are alive in him. There’s a wonderful Gospel story concerning Martha, the sister of Lazarus, who questioned Jesus over the death of her brother who had just died. Jesus asked her, “Do you believe in the Resurrection?” She replied that she believed in the Resurrection in the next life. Jesus then corrected her one-sided view of the Resurrection by saying, “I am the Resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will never die” (John 11:25). In other words, the new life of the Resurrection is for the living, not something that only takes place after we die.

Many Christians today make the same mistake of viewing the Resurrection only as an after-death experience. That is not enough. Christians need to realize that the Resurrection is something that begins when they are alive and continues after they are dead.

Thus, we need to view the Resurrection as a rising to new life, here and now. We need to focus our attention on the grace of the present moment. We need to commit ourselves to follow the example of Jesus: the way, the truth, and the life, for He is God, “not of the dead, but of the living.”

Fr. Hugh Duffy