Daily Gospel Reflection – Wednesday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time

Daily Gospel Reflection – Wednesday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time

Bishop Robert Barron 

June 7, 2023 

Wednesday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time 

Gospel: Mk 12:18-27 

Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and put this question to him, saying, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us, 

If someone's brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, his brother must take the wife and raise up descendants for his brother.

Now there were seven brothers. The first married a woman and died, leaving no descendants. So the second brother married her and died, leaving no descendants, and the third likewise. And the seven left no descendants. Last of all the woman also died. At the resurrection when they arise whose wife will she be? For all seven had been married to her." Jesus said to them, "Are you not misled because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but they are like the angels in heaven. As for the dead being raised, have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God told him,

I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?

He is not God of the dead but of the living. You are greatly misled." 

*United States Conference of Catholic 

Bishop Robert Barron

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus confronts the Sadducees, who did not believe in resurrection from the dead. They proposed a conundrum that they thought would disprove resurrection: If a woman married seven brothers, all of whom died, whose wife would she be in the resurrection? 

Notice how Jesus deals with this little conundrum: he brushes it aside. Jesus says to them, "When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but they are like the angels in heaven." 

What’s he saying here as he brushes aside this little bit of casuistry? What is heaven? Is it escaping from the body? No, that’s not it. That’s not a biblical view. Heaven is a place where our bodiliness will be so rich and so intense that we will be able to relate to all those around us in the most intimate and powerful way possible. 

And there we will be fully alive, for as Jesus explained from the Torah, God is not God of the dead but of the living.