32nd Sunday in O.T.

(C) 11-11-07

Prepared by: Fr. Lawrence J. Donohoo, O.P.

Scripture Readings
First 2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14
Second 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5
Gospel Luke 20:27-38, or 20:27, 34-38

1. Subject Matter
• Undergirded by an unwavering faith in the resurrection, Maccabees offers an extreme
exhortation to show unyielding loyalty to God and to persevere under torment.
• St. Paul commends to the Thessalonians a general Christian perseverance in the faith and in
prayer.
• Jesus’ response to the Sadducees’ stumper is an unequivocal teaching on the resurrection of
the human person to eternal life.

2. Exegetical Notes
• The passage on the resurrection of the dead is so important that all three Synoptic Gospels
record it, and the Gospel of John supplements this with its own abundance of teachings on
the resurrection of the body.
• “Luke has derived this episode mainly from Mark 12:18-27, which he has at times cast into
better Greek. . .Lucan dependence on ‘Mk’ is especially clear in vv. 27-34a,37,38a.”
(Fitzmyer)
• “In effect, Jesus says to the Sadducees, those who quote Moses (about levirate marriage)
should also listen to him (about resurrection); and the Lucan Jesus adds, even about
immortality.” (Fitzmyer)
• “The fact that a widow serves as the catalyst for the discussion introduces an intriguing
theological dimension. With the appearance of Anna at the beginning of the Gospel (Lk
2:365-40), widowhood is identified with holiness. A widow is the beneficiary of Jesus’
preeminent compassion and generosity (Lk 7:11-15). In the teaching of Christ, a widow
serves as the paradigm of Christian prayer (Lk 18:3-5). And before his Passion, Christ
praises the self-abandonment of a widow as the exemplar of quintessential faith (Lk 21:1-4).
. .[T]he Sadducees overlook the most significant aspect of the hypothetical widow’s life. She
is going to heaven because she is holy.” (P. J. Cameron)
3. References to the Catechism of the Catholic Church
• 992 God revealed the resurrection of the dead to his people progressively. Hope in the bodily
resurrection of the dead established itself as a consequence intrinsic to faith in God as
creator of the whole man, soul and body. The creator of heaven and earth is also the one
who faithfully maintains his covenant with Abraham and his posterity. It was in this double
perspective that faith in the resurrection came to be expressed. In their trials, the Maccabean
martyrs confessed: “The King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life,
because we have died for his laws.”
• 988 The Christian Creed--the profession of our faith in God, the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit, and in God's creative, saving, and sanctifying action--culminates in the
proclamation of the resurrection of the dead on the last day and in life everlasting.
• 989 We firmly believe, and hence we hope that, just as Christ is truly risen from the dead and
lives for ever, so after death the righteous will live for ever with the risen Christ and he will
raise them up on the last day. Our resurrection, like his own, will be the work of the Most Holy
Trinity.
• 994 Jesus links faith in the resurrection to his own person: "I am the Resurrection and the
life." It is Jesus himself who on the last day will raise up those who have believed in him,
who have eaten his body and drunk his blood. Already now in this present life he gives a sign
and pledge of this by restoring some of the dead to life, announcing thereby his own
Resurrection, though it was to be of another order. He speaks of this unique event as the
"sign of Jonah," the sign of the temple: he announces that he will be put to death but rise
thereafter on the third day.
• 996 From the beginning, Christian faith in the resurrection has met with incomprehension and
opposition.” On no point does the Christian faith encounter more opposition than on the
resurrection of the body." 55 It is very commonly accepted that the life of the human person
continues in a spiritual fashion after death. But how can we believe that this body, so clearly
mortal, could rise to everlasting life?
• 997 What is "rising"? In death, the separation of the soul from the body, the human body
decays and the soul goes to meet God, while awaiting its reunion with its glorified body. God,
in his almighty power, will definitively grant incorruptible life to our bodies by reuniting them
with our souls, through the power of Jesus' Resurrection.
• 998 Who will rise? All the dead will rise, "those who have done good, to the resurrection of
life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment."
• 1000 [How?] This "how" exceeds our imagination and understanding; it is accessible only to
faith. Yet our participation in the Eucharist already gives us a foretaste of Christ's
transfiguration of our bodies: Just as bread that comes from the earth, after God's blessing
has been invoked upon it, is no longer ordinary bread, but Eucharist, formed of two things,
the one earthly and the other heavenly: so too our bodies, which partake of the Eucharist, are
no longer corruptible, but possess the hope of resurrection.
• 1001 When? Definitively "at the last day," "at the end of the world." Indeed, the resurrection
of the dead is closely associated with Christ's Parousia.
• 1002 Christ will raise us up "on the last day"; but it is also true that, in a certain way, we have
already risen with Christ. For, by virtue of the Holy Spirit, Christian life is already now on
earth a participation in the death and Resurrection of Christ.
• 1003 United with Christ by Baptism, believers already truly participate in the heavenly life of
the risen Christ, but this life remains "hidden with Christ in God." The Father has already
"raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus."
Nourished with his body in the Eucharist, we already belong to the Body of Christ. When we
rise on the last day we "also will appear with him in glory."
• 1004 In expectation of that day, the believer's body and soul already participate in the dignity
of belonging to Christ. This dignity entails the demand that he should treat with respect his
own body, but also the body of every other person, especially the suffering.
• 655 Christ's Resurrection - and the risen Christ himself is the principle and source of our
future resurrection: "Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have
fallen asleep. . . For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive." The risen
Christ lives in the hearts of his faithful while they await that fulfillment . In Christ, Christians
"have tasted. . . the powers of the age to come"529 and their lives are swept up by Christ into
the heart of divine life, so that they may "live no longer for themselves but for him who for
their sake died and was raised."

4. Patristic Commentary and Other Authorities

• St. Augustine: "No doctrine of the Christian Faith is so vehemently and so obstinately
opposed as the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh."
• Bede: “[The Sadducees] devise this story in order to convict those of folly who assert the
resurrection of the dead. Hence they propose a base fable in order to deny the truth of the
resurrection.”
• Bede: “All sinners will rise again and abide without marriage in that new world. But our Lord
wished to mention only the elect in order to incite the minds of his hearers to search into the
glory of the resurrection.”
• St. John Chrysostom: “It is not so much the multitude of his subjects that manifests God’s
power as the virtue of his servants. Thus he does not so delight in the name of the God of
heaven and earth as in that of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
• Bede: “Since they had been defeated in argument, the Sadducees ask Jesus no further
questions, but seize him and deliver him up to the Roman power. From which we may learn
that the poison of envy may indeed be subdued but not extinguished.”
• St. Maximus of Turin: “God has given us a great and marvelous gift this saving paschal
day, on which the risen Lord offers resurrection to all creatures. Ascending from the depths to
the heights, in his own body he has lifted us as well from the nether regions to those that are
above, for, according to the Apostle, all of us Christians are the body of Christ and its
members. In Christ’s resurrection, then, all his members have necessarily risen with him.”
• St. Maximus of Turin: “[T]hey who are companions in suffering ought also to be sharers in
gladness. Those who have borne evils for Christ’s sake ought also to have glory with Christ.
Let us announce, I say, the grace of the Lord’s Pasch to the holy martyrs, so that as we
 preach that the gates of his sepulcher were opened, their graves might also be opened; and
as we say that his dead body suddenly came alive as warm blood flowed through his veins,
their limbs long cold might also be warmed with the warmth of immortality.”

5. Examples from the Saints and Other Exemplars

• St. Justin is an example of a martyr who offered his life because he believed in the
resurrection and who was killed because of the same belief.
• Pope John Paul II has called the twentieth century Church a Church of martyrs whose
witness must not be forgotten. The lives and deaths of such witnesses as Maria Goretti,
Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein, and Oscar Romero are too well known to require elaboration.
• In his Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive World History, Robert
Royal estimates that over one million Catholics have died for their faith in the past century.
We are used to thinking in terms of saintly individuals, but consider these horrible statistics
concerning the largest suppression of believers in world history. Before the Soviet
suppression, the Ukrainian Catholic Church had 2,772 parishes, 8 bishops, 4,119 churches
and chapels, 142 monasteries and convents, 2,628 priests, 164 monks, 773 nuns, and 4
million laypeople. After the suppression, all numbers were zero.

6. Quotations from Pope Benedict XVI

• “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an
event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. Saint John's Gospel
describes that event in these words: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that
whoever believes in him should ... have eternal life” (3:16).
• “Love embraces the whole of existence in each of its dimensions, including the dimension of
time. It could hardly be otherwise, since its promise looks towards its definitive goal: love
looks to the eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication,
but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its
liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the
discovery of God.”
• “Immortality as conceived by the Bible proceeds not from the personal force of what is in
itself indestructible but from being drawn into the dialogue with the Creator; that is why it
must be called awakening.”
• “That the awakening is expected on the ‘Last Day,’ at the end of history, and in the
community of all humankind, indicates the communal character of human immortality, which
is related to the whole of mankind, from which, toward which and with which the individual
has lived.”
• “Resurrection means that through the twisted paths of sin and more powerfully than sin God
ultimately says: “It is good.” God speaks his definitive ‘good’ to creation by taking it up into
himself and thus changing it into a permanence beyond all transcience. . .Resurrection is the
start of a present, a now that will never end.”
7. Other Considerations
• St. Paul’s instruction in Christian perseverance offers an appealing structure that ends where
it begins: his general exhortation to perseverance is followed by an appeal for prayers for the
apostolic mission, which in turn enable him and his fellow ministers to persevere in the work
of building up the churches, including the church in Thessalonica.
• Anthropology reveals a near-universal belief, or at least desire to believe, in a life after death,
and a conviction that the Invisible Power would not allow the just to go unrewarded, the
wicked unpunished, and the achievements of human civilization unrequited. Since God is the
creator of the human heart, it is inconceivable that he would frustrate the dreams of a
desperate humankind expressing in myriad ways through the countless centuries an
unquenchable hope that life exists beyond the dead end of the grave.
• Maccabees’ narrative of the mother and her seven sons contains the most explicit statement
in the entire Scriptures on God’s creating the universe out of nothing. The relevance of this
teaching for the terrible situation she endures with her sons is that if God can create the
world from nothing, he can certainly reconstitute the human person after death for eternal life.
• When Jesus clarifies the central and most pressing problem of human existence, he does not
speak in parables or obscurely, but states the truth simply and provides clear testimony from
the Scriptures.
• The centrality and certainty of the resurrection of the body was so firmly fixed in St. Paul’s
faith that he linked its denial with denial in Christ’s resurrection and a consequent futility of
the Christian faith.
• Paradoxically, the very otherworldliness that is contained in the doctrine of the resurrection,
when joined to Christ’s constant teaching that we must provide an account of ourselves, is
the main reason for fully engaging this world since our actions here and now bear eternal
consequences.

Recommended Resources
Benedict XVI. Benedictus: Day by Day with Pope Benedict XVI. Edited by Peter John Cameron.
Yonkers: Magnificat, 2006.
Benedict XVI. Deus Caritas Est (God is Love) (USCCB, 2005).
Cameron, Peter John. To Praise, To Bless, To Preach - Cycle C. Huntington: Our Sunday
Visitor, 2000.
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV. The Anchor Bible, vol. 28. Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985.
Maximus of Turin, St. The Sermons of St. Maximus of Turin. Ancient Christian Writers, no. 50.
Translated and edited by Boniface Ramsey. New York: Newman Press, 1989.
Thomas Aquinas, St. Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels. Works of the Fathers.
Vol. 3, Pt. 2. London, 1843. Reprinted by The St. Austin Press, 1997.