Today’s readings: Maccabees 7, 1-2.9-14; 2 Thessalonians 2, 16 - 3,5; Lk 20, 27-38.

For a long span of time in our religion, it was afterlife, belief in the resurrection of the dead and in the life of the world to come that firmly constituted the foundations of our faith and a most solid reason for believing. Now we live in times when, provoked more by questions of relevance, justice and meaning of existence in the midst of so much suffering, life in the world to come is very often left on the back burner.

Can belief in the resurrection of the dead still justify and consolidate our faith in the face of today’s provocations? In times when pragmatism has become the rule, can belief in the resurrection still halt the postmodernist slide? In today’s gospel, sceptics of the resurrection pose the classic hypothetical question to Jesus. But in the first reading from the book of Maccabees we have the stirring story of the mother and her seven sons who were tortured and slaughtered for their faith.

The book of Maccabees in the Bible is a historical book that tells of the Jewish struggle for religious and political freedom from the self-imposing Greek empire. The Maccabees were a Jewish family that stood up against the tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes who persecuted the Jews and desecrated their temple to destroy their religion. The book tells of a resistance movement at a time when in the midst of war, intrigue and murder, God’s hand was seen and felt, and martyrs were dying for their faith.

It is not paranoid to speak even today of modern-day empires that threaten belief and seek to flatten public life to mere immanence. This may be the reaction to a past when our religion had become our culture and our culture was our religion. By its very nature, faith in God is open to culture and there need not be any antagonism between faith and culture or between religion and society.

The burden of proof to justify faith’s claims about life’s meaning and about life in the world remains always in our court. As with the Sadducees in the gospel, we will always be faced with hypothetical and real-life questions to answer. But as with the reading from Maccabees, we continue also to be provoked by a surrounding culture where empires still thrive and seek, even violently at times, to secularise life completely and desecrate the temple, both literally and metaphorically.

Literally, because in this day and age, persecutions are still under way and people are still being killed for their beliefs. It suffices to look at Iraq or Syria. Metaphorically, because religion is still derided, and we often find ourselves almost empty-hand­ed in the face of a secularising culture whose sole concern seems to be a one-sided wellbeing of the people.

In such cultural, social and political scenarios, we cannot afford to perpetuate a false facade of religion which boils down to mere devotion or to an often anachronistic cultural religious practice or celebration. This is a crossroad situation for the churches. And to quote philosopher of religion Peter Kreeft, “when the road approaches the cliff-edge, warning signs and maps are needed more, and God provides them”.

For that we need to have a listening ear and the wisdom of discernment to be alerted to the warning signs that show clearly in the very culture we breathe. We need also to open our maps to have better acquaintance of the uncharted grounds we are treading upon. To quite an extent the culture we live in is becoming more and more estranged and disconnected from the visions that shaped our outlook on life for centuries.

This makes our situation a cliff-edge situation which necessitates on our part to go back to the drawing board to revise our claims as believers and how we are justifying them, as well as to rediscover our faith as a force within that can make us stand up for what we believe in.

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