Today’s readings: 2 Maccabees 7, 1-2.9-14; 2 Thessalonians 2, 16 - 3,5; Luke 20, 27-38.
Persecution is a word we normally attach to first-century Christians when the Christian religion, still in its formative years, was refuted in the wake of Christ’s own crucifixion. Yet today’s first reading from the Maccabean period in the Old Testament witnesses to times of persecution when the Maccabees resisted against the impositions of Greek culture on Judaic religion.
This reading is exceptionally rich in that it is already proof of a fully-fledged belief before Christ in the afterlife. There are people courageous enough to die for a cause. This is a truth on various levels of life. But this reading from Maccabees narrates people whose right cause, which justifies facing death with determination, is faithfulness to God, to one’s own faith. It testifies also to the strength of a people’s faith.
This time of increasing oppression in the Old Testament tended to be seen as a sign that the final era was imminent and gave rise to what we call apocalyptic literature, interpreting through visions the expectation of some world-waking turn of events. This is not characteristic only of our Scriptures. It has always figured prominently in various cultures throughout time.
The Sadducees confronting Jesus in today’s gospel originated as a select party from the time of the Maccabees in the second century before Christ. Among the Maccabees there was a party staunchly against the intrusion of a foreign culture and influence on religion. But the Sadducees, for convenience’s sake and to retain their power over the Temple, accepted Roman rule and customs. It was simply political compromise.
They did not expect a liberating messiah, neither did they believe in the resurrection of the dead. In today’s gospel they confront Jesus with an example verging on absurdity, instancing seven brothers each of whom marries the same woman and all dying childless. The difficulty of whose wife is she actually going to be, was funnily transposed to life after death with the intent of ridicule.
It is difficult to imagine what the afterlife could be. Or rather, it is easy to imagine, but imagination can be also very illusive, thinking in categories that pertain to life here on earth. Afterlife is after life, it is a reality radically different from life as we know it and from what we experience in our fleshy existence.
This is November, a full month the Church gives us to consider what the culture around us tends to obscure. There are two extremes to be avoided on this theme. First, we cannot afford to be childishly descriptive to the extent of ridicule; second, we cannot remain silent on a dimension to life and of our existence that should enlighten rather than dampen the meaning of life.
Jesus avoids detail. Biblical realism helps us to think of eternal life not in terms of some form of survival of what is spiritual in us but rather in terms of life as a whole, in its totality. Who are we? Does the normal definition which speaks of matter and spirit do justice to the reality of life and of our existence?
As John O’Donohue writes in his book Anam Cara, “we are wrong to think that death comes only at the end of life”. Many people, he writes, are terrified of letting go and like to be in control of what is happening around them and to them. The real thing is that becoming trapped in the protective attitude that we weave around our life can be destructive of life’s true meaning. It makes us lose sight of blessings that come our way.
Learning to let go, the practice of detachment, is not something negative in itself. Yet we are so taken up, so busy and distracted, that we cannot dedicate enough time or recognition to the depths within us. When that happens, death remains the stranger, the destroyer of life, the end of it all. It becomes simply the destruction of what we lived for. But there is much more to life than what at times we make of it.