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The Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C)

In today’s Gospel (Luke 20:27-38), “some Sadducees” confronted Jesus on the idea of the resurrection from the dead. The Sadducees were a group of Jews in the First Century who disbelieved in the resurrection from the dead. Knowing that Jesus preached the doctrine of the resurrection, they gave our Lord a riddle: If a woman had seven husbands before her death, “at the resurrection, whose wife will that woman be? For all seven had been married to her” (v. 33). In heaven, Jesus tells us, we will be “like angels” for we neither marry nor are given in marriage” (vs. 35-36).

Marriage, as we know it, will cease to exist in heaven for it will have served its purpose as a sign of that eternal union – that divine marriage – every saved soul will have with the Blessed Trinity. What we experience in the here and now in regard to marriage is a vague, dim foreshadowing of the nuptial union God has prepared for each of us from all of eternity!

“Lord, when your glory appears, my joy will be full.” As we sing this response & listen to Psalm 17, God directs our attention towards our ultimate goal: union with him. If we pass from this life in the divine friendship, we will behold the Lord’s glory, and our joy will be complete.

This august and blessed life eternal will not be spent bodiless because we await the reception of our bodies back once again at the end of time, transformed by the resurrection and all the glory that event will entail. The Maccabean martyrs give witness (Greek: mártyros) to this glorious hope in the first reading (Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14). What the Jews expected to occur at the end of time ended up happening to Jesus in the middle of time. It is the resurrection of Jesus Christ that confirms the Jewish hope in the resurrection of the dead and bolsters our own hope while we await our bodily death.

By his passion, death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven, Jesus “has loved us and given us everlasting encouragement and good hope through his grace” (2 Thessalonians 2:16). God has not left us alone in our solitude to wonder what will happen in the age to come – no, rather, he has personally entered into our state of anxiety, gone through the veil of death, and shown us the way through. He is the “leader and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2).

In his encyclical letter titled Spe Salvi (By Hope We Were Saved), Pope Benedict XVI summed up for us the ultimate principle behind our hope: “Man’s great, true hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God – God who has loved us and who continues to love us ‘to the end,’ until all ‘is accomplished’ (cf. Jn 13:1; 19:30).’” (no. 26).