Neither marry nor are given in marriage

2Mac 7,1-2.9.14; Ps 16; 2Ts 2,16-3,5; Lk 20,27-38
10 NOVEMBRE

When the principle on which an argument is constructed is false, all the conclusions drawn from the argument are false. False principle, false deductions. It is enough for Jesus to say that after death, neither wife nor husband is taken and all the Sadducees’ speech falls. It is a rule that applies to the Sadducees of yesterday but also to the Sadducees of today. Today it is sufficient to say that many theological deductions are raised on the sand of false principles or contrary to the revealed truth and all is declared at once not relating to the true Word of the Lord. They are human and not divine thoughts, of the earth and not of the sky, of darkness and not of light.

On what true principles of faith, revelation, sacred doctrine and deposit of the truth, do almost all the moral, spiritual, ecclesial, ascetic and redemptive conclusions of our day find justification? It is enough to remind the very pure Word of Jesus and their falseness, lies and darkness will appear. But the human mind knows how to do these and other things. It succeeds in reducing all the Word of the Lord to a lie, naturally by appealing to the name of the Lord, but lying against Him and saying false testimonies. Through the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord reveals to us this historical condition in which his Word lives. The man’s lying word can make a darkness of his light.

How can you say, “We are wise, we have the law of the Lord”? Why, that has been changed into falsehood by the lying pen of the scribes! The wise are confounded, dismayed and ensnared; Since they have rejected the word of the Lord, of what avail is their wisdom? Therefore, I will give their wives to strangers, their fields to spoilers. Small and great alike, all are greedy for gain, prophet and priest, all practice fraud. They would repair, as though it were nought, the injury to the daughter of my people: “Peace, peace!” they say, though there is no peace. They are odious; they have done abominable things, yet they are not at all ashamed, they know not how to blush (Jer 8,8-12).

The adhesion of the mind, of the heart, of the soul and of the spirit must be given not to a part, but to all the Word of the Lord. When can this happen? When you want to be converted to it. If the will to get converted is lacking, the Word of the Lord will always be reduced to a lie. In this Pharisees, scribes, Sadducees were masters. But while Pharisees and scribes deprived the Word of its eternal truth placed by the Holy Spirit in it, the Sadducees also removed entire books from the Scriptures and a great many truths to the deposit of the right faith. They did not believe in the Angels either. Even the Deutero-canonical books were not considered belonging to the Holy Scriptures by them. Starting from their mind and not from revelation, they accepted what was convenient to their thoughts, but always conformed to their mind, and rejected what was not convenient, using quibbles fruit of their sin and wickedness cunning.

Some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, came forward 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 but died childless. Then the second and the third married her, and likewise all the seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. Now at the resurrection whose wife will that woman be? For all seven had been married to her.” Jesus said to them, “The children of this age marry and remarry; but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise. That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush, when he called ‘Lord’ the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; and he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”

Resurrection belongs to the essence of revelation, because it is the essence of God’s eternal love for man. Without resurrection there exists neither true redemption nor any soteriology might be called human. Man is the unity of one body and one soul forever, for time and for eternity. Other truths do not belong to the true God.

Mother of God, Angels and Saints, free us from all falsehood about God and man, today and always.