"We are very shy nowadays of even mentioning heaven", C.S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain. "We are afraid of the jeer about 'pie in the sky', and of being told that we are trying to escape from the duty of making a happy world here and now into dreams of a happy world elsewhere."

In today's Gospel, heaven is mentioned but with a controversial tone. The Sadducees were one of the philosophical schools in Judaism and they adhered strictly to the written Scriptures, rejecting any oral tradition and rejecting also the explicit belief in the resurrection, which developed quite late in Judaism.

The resurrection of the body and everlasting life is a basic element in our creed as Christians. It is also, admittedly, a very difficult theme to speak about. Even though we die, in all the senses of death, including the biological, we live if we are alive to Christ.

Luke's Gospel presents a series of controversies between Jesus and various representatives of the Jewish philosophical schools. These serve to consistently highlight the division between Jesus and his opponents as well as the paradox of Christianity in confrontation with the culture of all times. These controversies raged during first century Judaism and served to shape Christianity's emerging self-understanding within that setting.

There is radical discontinuity between the Good News of the Kingdom as proclaimed by Jesus and the expectations of the Jewish leaders. The perception of Jesus' opponents is of a closed-horizon religion. But God's revelation does not stop with Moses. God continues to speak and reveal Himself. Doctrine develops. We continue to proclaim God's Word and celebrate it precisely to deepen our understanding of the mysteries of life and death. God raises the dead to life as easily as God gives life in the first place.

Lack of faith in God, coupled with an impoverished imagination, may make of us practitioners of a religion which ultimately does not save. The hope of eternal life cannot be reduced to the perpetuation of a religion that represents more the dead faith of the living rather than the living faith of the dead. When things go that way, the themes on which we prefer to remain silent will multiply. Probably that is the reason why in our funeral celebrations, we prefer to speak on the significance of life, rather than about the mystery of death.

In all truth we have to admit that the Sadducees' difficulties are ours too. We ask big questions on life after death. And we do not have the answers. The problem with life as we live it today, is that we've shifted the questions of ultimate concern from life beyond death to this side of life. We consider that which is transitory to be of ultimate concern and tend to avoid speaking about what should be of ultimate concern.

As Christians we do not believe in re-incarnation; neither do we believe merely in a sort of immortality of the soul. We believe in a God who is not of the dead but of the living. We rely on God's promise that He will raise us up. Mother Teresa once identified the West - by which she meant those of us living lives of comparative affluence - as suffering from a far greater poverty than anything she and her companions had experienced in Calcutta. We face a poverty of spirit, she believed, because we have lost our pressing need for God, and have become self-sufficient. In this poverty of spirit, like the Sadducees at the time of Jesus, we seek to imagine heaven in terms of earthly life rather than making of heaven our heart's deepest longing.