It happened that seven brothers and their mother were arrested and were being compelled by the king, under torture with whips and cords, to partake of unlawful swine's flesh. One of them, acting as their spokesman, said, "What do you intend to ask and learn from us? For we are ready to die rather than transgress the laws of our fathers."
- II Maccabees 7:1,2
Jesus said to them, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die any more, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.”
- St. Luke 20:34-36
There’s something in us – no doubt, it’s a result of the fall of our first parents Adam and Eve – that makes us try to conform things to our own expectations. As a result of the disobedience of our first parents we seem to spend great amounts of time trying to dignify things which are unworthy, and bring down to a low level those things and ideas which are lofty, until we have everything right where we want it, on our own terms. It’s like an infection which has poisoned our society, so that things like easy divorce and remarriage become a “quest for personal happiness,” artificial contraception is transformed into “the responsible thing to do,” and the killing of unborn children is seen as “an issue of women’s health.” Such things as that make it more and more of a challenge to proclaim what we know to be objectively true. Of course, this disintegration of values and moral truths isn’t surprising. As St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, there are “wicked and evil men, for not all have faith.”
What we experience in the world today isn’t new. We see an ancient example of this in the Second book of Maccabees. King Antiochus wanted there to be only one religion in his kingdom – one religion which would be established on his own terms. And as he began to implement his own self-defined religion, the Jews wouldn’t submit to it. There was no place in the kingdom of Antiochus for the revealed law of the God of Israel, and so the king spent an enormous amount of energy trying to destroy the faith of the Jews, attempting to drag their understanding of truth down his own definition, so that their modified and emasculated faith would fit into his own plan for his kingdom. This has an uncomfortably familiar sound to it, when we consider the development of some of our own society’s laws and the prevailing attitudes today, even coming out of the mouths of many of the politicians who want to lead us.
St. Luke records an occasion when some Sadducees came to Jesus, pretending they had a serious question. The Sadducees were the Jewish aristocrats of their day. They were refined. They were sophisticated. They were knowledgeable about the law. And their faith consisted of simply obeying whatever their personal understanding of the law was. Their religion was for the “here and now,” and certainly there was no room in their understanding for things they considered to be ridiculous, such as the resurrection of the body, which was being preached by Jesus.
So the Sadducees came to our Lord – not with instruments of torture like those used by King Antiochus against the Jews – but with an instrument which was sharp and destructive in other ways. They came with their biting sarcasm, using it to ridicule the teaching of Christ.
We can picture them. In their sophistication and sarcasm, they pretended to have an interest in the resurrection. We can only imagine what Jesus was thinking as they were speaking. Here were individuals about whom it was well-known that they completely disbelieved the reality of the resurrection of the dead, and yet they composed this elaborate story about a woman who successively married seven brothers. And after constructing this involved story, they ask, with a feigned innocence and interest, “Whose wife will she be after the resurrection?”
Jesus could have turned on them, calling them the hypocrites that they were, asking them why they were bothering Him with questions about something in which they didn’t even believe. But Christ didn’t do that. Instead, He used the opportunity to teach the truth. Even if the Sadducees themselves didn’t have the ears to hear what He was saying, nonetheless He stated the truth. Patiently, He explains things to them. He acts as though they truly are interested in the answer. “She’ll be no one’s wife,” He says, “because there is no need of marriage in heaven; they have become equal to the angels, as children of the resurrection.”
And then Jesus goes on to beat the Sadducees at their own game. These individuals who prided themselves on their knowledge of Scripture and the prophets were led into a trap which they didn’t see coming. Christ tells them, “Surely you remember that Moses referred to the Lord as the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob – and you revere the words of Moses – surely Abraham, Isaac and Jacob must be children of the resurrection, or else how could the Lord be called their God, if they’ve ceased to exist?” The trap which the Sadducees had laid for Jesus backfired on them, because as Christ pointed out to them, God is not the “God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.”
To this very day, we’re confronted by Sadducees under various guises and titles. There have always been, and there will probably always be, those who disbelieve important teachings of the faith, and who attempt to attack various revealed doctrines by trying to point out how ridiculous they are, or how meaningless they are, or how irrelevant they are. The Sadducees of Christ’s day are nothing more than the ancestors of those in our own day who try to modify the teaching of the Church in a misguided effort to bring the revealed faith down to a purely human level. They attack the basic tenets of the Church; they ridicule the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament; they scoff at the reality of heaven and hell; they deny the existence of sin; they ignore the need for repentance; they manufacture the myth that what once was considered to be true no longer is, because “times have changed.”
What a lesson we can learn from Christ when He was dealing with the Sadducees. He didn’t wring His hands; He didn’t get upset at their disbelief; He didn’t raise His voice. All He did was counter their heresy with the truth. When we’re faced with those who try to drag the faith down to the level of the world, we must do what Jesus did: proclaim the truth, plant the seed, and let God give the increase.
Of course, this means that we must know our faith. We must be people who know the scriptures. We must be people who know how the Church interprets those Scriptures. We must be people who know what the Church’s moral teaching is. We must be people who make God and His Church central in their lives. It’s easy to fall into the trap which gets laid in our path: that of reducing God’s truth to personal opinion. But we have been called to something greater. We’ve been called to the high purpose of raising the world and ourselves up to the level of God’s revealed truth, as it is revealed through His Holy Catholic Church. And we can do this, because we are children of the living God – the God who has planted His truth in our lives, as living witnesses to Him in the midst of an unbelieving world.
And how can we best accomplish this? By binding ourselves irrevocably to the Church; by remaining close to God through the sacraments; by supporting those voices which speak the truth; by giving our support to those parishes where God is worshipped in spirit and in truth; by standing in support of those bishops, priests, deacons and religious who teach God’s truth, and not some hybrid version of their own. You and I must be vigilant and courageous in remaining faithful, because as we are faithful to God, so He will always be faithful to us.
________________________________
Image: "The Question of the Sadducees"
by Harold Copping (1863-1932)