32nd Sunday 2013
Robert VerEecke, S.J.
(Start with a deep breath in, and a sigh out)
“Now there came to Him some of the Sadducees (who say that there is no
resurrection) and they questioned Him…”
Questions, questions, questions. In the Gospel stories, religious authorities
are often asking Jesus questions. They are usually trick questions. They are
meant to make him trip over his own words, get tangled in his logic, even
say something, God forbid, that is blasphemy.
But Jesus usually turns the tables on his adversaries—even though they do
not really want to hear what he has to say. They do not want to listen to him
and genuinely engage in conversation. They only want to make their point
and show him up. But His answers confound them and sometimes even
enrage them.
They are most often left speechless by the answers Jesus gives. What is so
disconcerting about the questions that these adversaries ask is that they
trivialize the subject. In the hypothetical question that the Sadducees ask of
Jesus today that is certainly the case: “In the Resurrection whose wife will
she be?” They have built a case where they take the command of the law to
its extreme and want Jesus to comment on the absurdity of the situation. But
he doesn’t get caught. He shifts the ground of the discourse.
Where the Sadducees trivialize the question of Resurrection, Jesus raises the
ante, so to speak, quoting the passage of the burning Bush and God’s selfrevelation as Life itself.
Questions, Questions, Questions. This past week, I’ve been struggling to
answer some very challenging questions. Questions for which I know I don’t
have “good” answers. Last Monday evening I asked those folks who are
thinking of becoming Christian or completing their Christian initiation in the
Catholic Church if they had any questions.
First question: What is Evil? Second question: Why do Catholics pray to the
Saints? Third question: Why is there so little focus on Social Justice issues
in the liturgy? Easy questions! I found myself taking a deep breath in and
sighing out before I tried to answer. (I wonder if Jesus began his response to
questions with a deep breath in and a sigh out.)
If I thought those questions were challenging, the next morning I met with
someone whose questions were: What is your concept of God? What is
Prayer? Do you believe in an Afterlife? (Deep breath in, sigh out). Easy
questions! 
My questioner was not someone who wanted to trip me up and make me
stumble over my lack of rigorous reasoning. He was someone who had lost
his only son to an untimely and sudden death. He came to me “hoping” that I
could find words that might make sense of the senseless. He said to me,
“Father I live in a world that is 90 percent secular. I know almost no one
who has faith in God. Talk of God, faith, afterlife? It’s not worth the breath
that it takes to speak the words.”
My friend’s questions did not arise from intellectual curiosity but from the
searing pain of loss. How could it possibly be that you could love someone
so much, be so closely bound with another human being for a time and
then… What? Why?
Another deep breath and a sigh. I told him that for me, God is not a concept,
not an idea. God is someone with whom I have a personal relationship. I’ve
had enough “burning bush” experiences in my life as a Jesuit where I’ve
been immersed in mystery to dare to say that, yes, God IS.
Beyond all names, categories, descriptions, I AM. I told my friend of the
experience at the end of the Spiritual Exercises when it felt like the essence
of Love, the essence of God was being poured into my body and it was too
much to bear. God/love essentially is way too much for us. It is why I
believe God remains hidden, why we do not see the face of God, except in
the human face of Jesus. We can talk “about” God but ultimately there is
only silence. Perhaps a deep breath and a sigh.
I’m not going to relate to you all of our hour-long conversation but simply
say that sometimes the questions that people ask you make you think more
deeply. You have to go back and ask yourself: What do I really believe?
What about an Afterlife?
That’s a funny expression isn’t it? After life? What could possibly be after
life? After is a time expression. Eternity is no time. But life is all we know.
My friend’s son was so alive. Afterlife sounds so very life-less.
Those Jews who unlike the Sadducees did believe in the Resurrection,
believed in a re-membering of the one who had died. God, the living and
faithful one, would remember his promise to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob
and Sarah and Rebecca and Rachel and to the whole Jewish people. In
remembering, God would Re-member, bring about a new way of being alive
in this world as those ultimately justified.
As NT Wright says in his book the Challenge of Jesus, when he speaks of
the Jewish understanding of Resurrection:
The word Resurrection was only used to describe re-embodiment, not the
state of disembodied bliss. Resurrection was not a general word for “life
after death” or for “going to be with God” in some general sense. It was the
word for what happened when God created newly embodied human beings
after whatever intermediate state there may be.
That is what those Jewish followers experienced after Jesus’ death on the
cross. They saw him and recognized as re-membered in some bodily way but
also in some dimension where the limits of time and space are not limits and
boundaries but completely new realities.
My friend came to ask me questions about God, Prayer and the Afterlife
because more than anything else he wants to know that his beloved Son is
alive and well, even if in some other time and space where time and space
are not what we know now. The last thing I would want to do is trivialize
those questions that come from a broken heart with “easy” and “pat”
answers. The questions my friend asked are the questions that arise from
deep within us. But if we go deep within we know that each of us has within
us the greatest longing for union. Here and now. Here and hereafter. It is
longing for union with those whom we love that God remembers and God
re-members. We hope so.