YOU ARE GREATLY MISLED

2Tm 1.1-3.6-12; Ps 122; Mk 12,18-27
6 JUNE
The Sadducees lived a strange faith. They lacked the complete canon of the Scriptures. They had a critical thought of rejection of all that was the tradition of the Fathers, even regarding truths that were the backbone of all the Old Testament revelation. Having to rationally prove the validity of every truth denied by them, they used true argumentative alchemy to testify that they were right and others are in error. We know from the Book of Acts that often the debate or the diatribes with the Pharisees resulted in brawls and very bitter fighting.

Paul was aware that some were Sadducees and some Pharisees, so he called out before the Sanhedrin, “My brothers, I am a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees; (I) am on trial for hope in the resurrection of the dead.” When he said this, a dispute broke out between the Pharisees and Sadducees, and the group became divided. For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection or angels or spirits, while the Pharisees acknowledge all three. 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?” The dispute was so serious that the commander, afraid that Paul would be torn to pieces by them, ordered his troops to go down and rescue him from their midst and take him into the compound. The following night the Lord stood by him and said, “Take courage. For just as you have borne witness to my cause in Jerusalem, so you must also bear witness in Rome.”

The question that today the Sadducees place on Jesus Christ is based on arguments and deductions that are a true transposition of earthly reality into eternal reality. Wishing them to deny the eternal reality of the resurrection and consequently of immortality, they convince people, using a possible event in history, but not possible in eternity, that eternity does not exist. Since every man must have his woman and every woman his man, in eternity there would be a woman with seven husbands or there would be six men without a woman. Since this is not possible, what is their conclusion? Resurrection does not exist. If it existed, six men would be condemned not to own any woman or a woman would be forced to live with seven husbands at the same time. Time is not a criterion for reading eternity.

Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him and put this question to him, saying, “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.’ Now there were seven brothers. The first married a woman and died, leaving no descendants. So the second married her and died, leaving no descendants, and the third likewise. And the seven left no descendants. Last of all the woman also died. At the resurrection (when they arise) whose wife will she be? For all seven had been married to her.” Jesus said to them, “Are you not misled because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God? When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but they are like the angels in heaven. As 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’? He is not God of the dead but of the living. You are greatly misled.”

A single word is sufficient to Jesus the Lord to break this circuit of illogicality and artificial reasoning. In eternity one is transformed into spirit, he is like the Angels of God. You do not take either wife or husband. The earth is the earth. Eternity is eternity. Eternity is not the transformation into the perennial life of life on earth. There you enter through another life. The resurrection is a very pure work of divine omnipotence. The Father will rise our body from the dust, from nothing and will deliver it to the soul and the human person will be recomposed. The Holy Scripture attests that the soul is immortal already at the moment of death when it says that God, the true God, is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God is the God of the living, not the God of the dead. The light is from the Scriptures.

Woman dressed with the sun, Angels and Saints, give us the purest truth of our God and Lord.