Daily Gospel Reflection: Saturday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time
November 25, 2023
Saturday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time
Gospel: Lk 20:27-40
Some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection,
came forward and put this question to Jesus, 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 but died childless.
Then the second and the third married her,
and likewise all the seven died childless.
Finally the woman also died.
Now at the resurrection whose wife will that woman be?
For all seven had been married to her."
Jesus said to them,
"The children of this age marry and remarry;
but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age
and to the resurrection of the dead
neither marry nor are given in marriage.
They can no longer die,
for they are like angels;
and they are the children of God
because they are the ones who will rise.
That the dead will rise
even Moses made known in the passage about the bush,
when he called 'Lord'
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob;
and he is not God of the dead, but of the living,
for to him all are alive."
Some of the scribes said in reply,
"Teacher, you have answered well."
And they no longer dared to ask him anything.
*United States Conference of Catholic
Bishop Robert Barron
Friends, today’s Gospel reports a conversation Jesus had with some of the Sadducees, who held that there is no life after death. We can practically hear their speech on the lips of secularists today.
But Jesus is having none of it. The dead shall indeed rise, he says. Otherwise, how could Moses have spoken of God as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, all of whom were long dead by Moses’ time? But their risen existence, though in continuity, even bodily continuity, with what has gone before, will be transformed, transfigured, raised up.
Those who hold to the resurrection of the body are those who are most effective at working for justice and peace in this world. If you are a complete materialist and secularist, you hold that everything and everybody, in the end, just fades away. But if you believe in the resurrection of the body, then everything in this world is destined for redemption. Everything matters.
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