In our semi-continuous reading through Luke’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples, after passing through Jericho, where they encountered Zacchaeus, finally reach Jerusalem. True to form, Jesus starts stirring up trouble.
Jesus was teaching about the reality of the resurrection. This is what causes the Sadducees to challenge him with a legal, or, in Jewish terms, a halakhic, conundrum. This challenge provides him with the chance to drop not one but two knowledge bombs.
First, without denigrating the divine institution of marriage, Jesus shows that it is a sign and symbol of something greater. The ultimate wedding, of course, is the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. In this marriage of divinity and humanity, Jesus is the groom and the Church is his bride. He is always faithful to his sometimes-straying spouse. Serving as both a sign and symbol of this eschatological reality, marriage, when lived as a God-given vocation, points beyond itself.1
As Saint John Chrysostom observed: “When a husband and wife are united in marriage, they no longer seem like something earthly, but rather like the image of God himself.”2 As the Catechism teaches- God “is neither man nor woman” because “God transcends the human distinction between the sexes.”3 Divine revelation confirms that it is woman and man together who constitute the image of God.4 Hence, it is not a coincidence that Sacred Scripture begins with the wedding in the Garden and culminates with the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.5
As Chrysostom further noted: “if a man and woman marry in order to be companions on the journey through earth to heaven, then their union will bring great joy to themselves and to others.”6 In the here and now, Christian marriage serves both salvific and evangelical purposes. While the bonds of affection we forge through the fires of life are not broken at death, they are thoroughly transformed by the love of God into something infinitely greater than we can imagine.
Second, Jesus turns to the Torah to demonstrate the reality of the resurrection. This is important because, unlike the Pharisees, who adhered to and taught both the written and oral law and who believed in the resurrection, the Sadducees, who made up the aristocratic priestly caste of Jerusalem, only accepted as scripture the first five books of the Old Testament, often referred to as the Torah.7
Sadducees explicitly rejected the oral law and held the prophets in low esteem. As a result, they were opposed to teachings not found in the Torah. They did not see the resurrection of the dead revealed in the Torah. Jesus, referring to Moses’s encounter with God in the burning bush, brilliantly demonstrates that resurrection is unmistakably found at the very heart of the Torah.8
Like many people, as a child, I learned to distinguish between Pharisees, who believed in the resurrection, and the Sadducees, who did not, by being taught that because they didn’t believe in the resurrection “they were sad, you see.”
Our first reading, taken from the Second Book of Maccabees, despite being composed before Christ, demonstrates precisely the fearlessness those who believe in the resurrection of the dead should have in the face of death. This reading put in me in mind of a scene from the French film Of Gods and Men.
Of Gods and Men is a biopic about the Cistercian martyrs of Algeria. These monks were abducted, tortured, and killed by Islamic extremists in the spring of 1996. In the scene, Brother Luc, who is a doctor as well as a monk providing medical services for the almost exclusively Muslim inhabitants of Tibhirine, tells his abbot that he is committed to remaining at the monastery despite the danger of being killed by Islamic extremists and by the Algerian army for helping Islamists wounded in the fighting.9
After noting that he helped wounded Nazis during World War II in France and would help even the devil were he to turn up in need of medical attention, Luc asserts: “I’m not scared of death. I am a free man.” A bit later in the film, Brother Luc is shown embracing a mural of Jesus on the cross, the true sign of his freedom.
In addition to Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem in the Synoptic Gospels (i.e., Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the Psalms provide us with the image of walking through the valley of the shadow of death, through which valley the Lord accompanies us.10 Taking its cue from Israel’s exodus from Egypt, the Letter to the Hebrews provides the image of the Church as God’s people on pilgrimage to the eternal city.11 These images give us the template, the meta-narrative for the Church and the life of every follower of Jesus.
Of course, the most intense expression of reality is the Lord’s passage from death to life via his passion. To be a Christian is to experience that, at least in worldly terms, you win by losing. Being a Christian means experiencing that exaltation is achieved through abasement. You can only save your life by losing it.
As the Christians of ancient Thessaloniki are assured in our second reading, “the Lord is faithful.”12 Because he is faithful, Christ “will strengthen you [against] and guard you from the evil one.”13 For your part, you must continually direct your heart to the love and God, no matter what you might be experiencing.
It is, therefore, important to pray for perseverance. As the lyrics to “Better Than a Hallelujah” insist: “We pour out our miseries/God just hears a melody.” There is a reason perseverance is the fruit of the fifth and final Sorrowful Mystery of the Blessed Virgin’s Rosary, which mystery is Christ’s crucifixion. Perseverance means pressing daily forward, in imitation of Jesus, to the city of God. God’s holy city is the destination for which you are created, redeemed, and for which you are being sanctified.
Bear in mind that Jesus goes to Jerusalem primarily to keep his appointment with the cross. Inescapably, the path to resurrection passes through the cross; without the cross, there is no resurrection. We gather each Sunday to celebrate Jesus’s rising from the dead. We give thanks to the Father that by the mystery of Christ’s dying and rising, we, too, shall live forever.
1 Ephesians 5:31-32.↩
2 Saint John Chrysostom, On Marriage and Family Life, trans. Catherine P. Ross and David Anderson.↩
3 Catechism of the Catholic Church, sec. 238.↩
4 Genesis 1:27.↩
5 See Genesis 2:24 & Revelation 19:6-9.↩
6 On Marriage and Family Life.↩
7 See Note on Matthew 3:7 in The Catholic Study Bible, “The New Testament,” 10.↩
8 Luke 20:37 & Exodus 3:15.↩
9 Scene from Gods and Men.↩
10 Psalm 23:4.↩
11 Letter to the Hebrews 4.↩
12 2 Thessalonians 3:3.↩
13 2 Thessalonians 3:3.↩
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