Resurrection, the evolutionary leap

Thirty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C

There is no empirical evidence to show us that there is life after death. Death seems to be the closing curtain on life, marking the end of life’s dramatic performance. Of course, popular genre and anecdotal testimonies tell us that the only way one survives beyond death, beyond the grave is if you return in the form of a ghostly spectre or you are reanimated as a zombie, a walking dead - basically a corpse which continues to have movement.

The idea of the resurrection is such a revolutionary thing, that most people dismiss it, even Christians and many Catholics. In fact, for many, reincarnation seems more plausible, since we all have flashes of déjà vu.

If many find our belief in the resurrection ludicrous, it was equally considered a farce by certain groups of Jews during our Lord’s time - the Sadducees. It was Holy Week when the Sadducees put the Lord to the test and hoped to make a mockery of the topic. Sadducees don’t believe in the resurrection because apart from the Torah, they reject the other books of the canon which contained both prophetic and wisdom literature. References to the resurrection can be found in these other books which they did not accept. So, they tried to make the belief look ridiculous by creating this hypothetical case: A woman has seven husbands, she marries one after the other as each dies. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection?

The Sadducees believed such a situation demonstrated that people will not rise from the dead. Their scenario would make one or all of the brothers guilty of adultery if all of them were living and married to her. The Sadducees would have secretly congratulated themselves that they had trapped the Lord in a theological quandary.

And yet our Lord effortlessly deflects their attack and uses this opportunity to instruct His audience on the nature of death as well as the nature of God. Unlike the Gospel of St Matthew, St Luke does not have our Lord insult His detractors by accusing them of not knowing their scriptures nor the power of God. Our Lord goes immediately into His two-part reply.

First, the Sadducees have wrongly assumed that life in the resurrection would be exactly the same as life in this present world. There will be continuity, but there will be no marriage in the resurrection. We will be like angels, who do not get married. The Sadducees cannot refute the existence of angels because they are frequently mentioned in the Torah.

More importantly, the Sadducees were wrong about the resurrection of the dead because such evidence could even be found in the five books of Moses, the only portion of the Old Testament that the Sadducees used for their theology. Our Lord pointed to the scene of Moses before the burning bush in Exodus 3, as proof for the resurrection, noting that God introduces Himself to Moses as the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

Implicitly, our Lord argued on the basis of both the verb tense and theology - if death ended the patriarchs' existence, God would have said, "I WAS the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." God’s use of the present tense implies that they live on to worship Him. Moreover, the Lord always keeps His promises, and His promise to the patriarchs—long life in the Promised Land and descendants as numerous as the stars - can be fulfilled only if they will live forever.

God is the God of the living not only because He is the only God who is alive—the other gods being dead because they do not truly exist as gods—but also because He is the God of the living. God's relationship to His people does not end at their death, for they live on to worship Him in heaven. Because God is the God of the living, we know that all His promises to us will be kept either now, or in the world to come.

The feast of All Saints and the commemoration of All Souls which we celebrated just last week, is an affirmation of this belief. Both feasts remind us of our mortality and also immortality. We are all finite, mortal creatures and death will be our common lot. But we are also uniquely loved by God among all His creatures, and for this reason, He has endowed us with an immortal soul. Our ultimate destiny lies in God’s hands, and even death cannot separate us from His love.

Our belief in the resurrection of the dead, our resurrection, is ultimately tied to the resurrection of the Lord. Believing that the Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead is essential for Christians. Merely recognising that He died for our sins is not enough; we must accept His resurrection in order to receive Eternal Life. We profess that Christ paid our debt, but His sacrifice on the cross means nothing if He possesses no power over the grave. In vanquishing evil and death, the Lord made our salvation possible. Jesus’ resurrection proved He was able to remove sin and its penalty.

Assuming Christ remained dead would mean accepting the opposite - that believers are still in sin. And the inevitable end of a sinful life is death. Consequently, a person who denies Christ’s eternal nature looks toward a void future. Bertrand Russell, a famous atheistic philosopher, offered this sad description of such hopelessness: “Brief and powerless is man’s life. On his and all his race, the slow sure doom falls, pitiless and dark.”

Instead of enjoying Christian liberty and anticipating a home in heaven, those who reject the resurrection are slaves to the present, with no real hope or meaning in life. This explains why so many are caught in the malaise of despair and hopelessness in our society today. When man no longer believes in the resurrection after death, in redemption after sin, he descends into the pit of meaninglessness. Career, family, and good works can offer brief pleasure but not the kind of joy that comes from knowing we are right with the Lord and working in His will. That is why the belief in the resurrection is not a point for theological debate. Either we believe Christ rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, or we do not. If we reject His victory over the grave, we deny ourselves a place in eternity. But if we accept the truth, Paul assures us that we will be saved.