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As we inch closer to the end of the current church year (liturgical year) and will soon be entering a new church year, with the Season of Advent, you will notice the Scripture readings naturally speak about the end times. As you hear them, they may even come across as dark or heavy. 

I don’t think most of us give too much time or energy thinking about the end of all time, but we have all entertained ideas about our personal end time, our deaths and what lies beyond if anything. There are a few experiences that automatically make me think about the afterlife. One experience is having someone I love die and wondering how I will open to their spirit now that they are physical gone. A second thing, that makes me think of the afterlife, is hearing about a person’s life that was full of suffering that they didn’t deserve or a life that ended way too soon. A third thing, that makes me think of the afterlife, is simply staring at the stars in the sky and feeling totally insignificant and asking, “What’s it all about?” 

From our Christian tradition, we tend to take for granted that life is eternal, because that’s what Jesus believed. The first reading and the gospel tell us that this belief in the afterlife was not something our Jewish ancestors in faith took for granted, like we do. The Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) go back some 1500 years before Christ, but it was only about 200 years before Christ that the idea of an afterlife starts to develop. Up until about 200 B.C., our Jewish ancestors believe something like this: There was no afterlife. You lived on in your children and grandchildren. Should you not be able to have children, it was shameful, and God was punishing you for some personal sin. Continuing in this thought, if you followed the Law (the Mosaic Law as handed down in the first five books of the Bible) you were rewarded immediately with good things in life, like children, herds of animals and bountiful crops. Since there was no belief in an afterlife, you were rewarded here and now. On the flip side, those who did evil could expect to be poor, childless, maybe physically impaired, and die an early death. You were either blessed or cursed by God, and it all happened here and now. 

Everyone pretty much thought this way until about 200 B.C. So, what happened around 200 B.C.? From about 200 B.C. until 63 B.C., our Jewish ancestors in faith lived under the domination of the Greeks. (After 63 B.C., right into Jesus’ time, the Jews lived under Roman domination). During the Greek occupation, King Antiochus, who we heard from in that first reading, made life very difficult for the Jews. The Greek king was enforcing Greek civilization and culture on all the Jews. He banned Jewish worship. This was religious persecution, and we still have it today. When the Jews were persecuted by the Greeks, and mothers and sons were being killed for not renouncing their beliefs as we heard in that first reading, it forced the Jewish leaders to rethink the idea of an afterlife. 

Before the Greek persecutions, the dominant thought was that good Jews who upheld the Law of Moses, would live long and prosperous lives. Good things would come their way because God was obviously blessing them. But what do we do with the case of the seven, young, good, Law-abiding men—and many others—who died early, cruel, and unjust deaths because they would not forsake their faith? Standing up for your faith, you would think, would be something pleasing to God, and if so, you would expect God’s blessing, right? These innocent young men, who were killed for their faith in God, would not live prosperous lives, nor would they live long enough to have children of their own. Something’s just not right. There must be justice for them, in another place—perhaps in an afterlife—because they deserved so much better than what they got. This was the beginning of the belief in an afterlife for the Jewish people and it all started because of a persecution around the year 200 B.C. 

However, as we heard in the gospel, there is a holdout group in Jesus’ time, the Sadducees, who did not believe in eternal life. In fact, they liked to ridicule people’s faith, especially those who did believe in the resurrection. So, they spin a ludicrous scenario of a woman who married seven men, one after another, and is still childless after each of them dies. Whose wife will she be in the afterlife? These Sadducees are not interested in dialogue, in learning, or in growing. They just want to set a trap in order to have Jesus say something that they feel is counter to the Jewish Law so they can accuse him, discredit him and eventually kill him. It’s a trap. These same Sadducees earlier tried to trap Jesus with the question of, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor?”

We’ve all done things like this ourselves. When we feel we are so right, we secretly delight in the downfall of those we feel are so wrong. Sadducees as a distinct group no longer exist, but the archetype, the ruling image, still exists in all our minds.

The Sadducees make fun of the idea of the afterlife and try to laugh it off. The afterlife, heaven, the resurrection: these questions trouble people today as much as they troubled Jesus; he doesn’t laugh it off. 

Perhaps my recent visit to the former Nazi concentration camp in Germany affected me more than I want to admit. Walking through Dachau, my mind was filled with images of immense and senseless suffering, but my heart was filling faster with my belief in the resurrection. Somehow, brutality, violence, cruelty, and death cannot ultimately be victorious in the long run even if they are victorious in the short term. Belief in Jesus’ resurrection is the basis for my belief in the resurrection of all life. It begins with choosing love, right now; I don’t have to wait until I die with fingers crossed. If you are choosing love, then you are choosing the eternal element that exists forever. If you are choosing to love and serve this world and your neighbour, you’re already in heaven. Maybe it doesn’t always feel like that, but in fact it’s the foretaste of the promise.      

And when Jesus says that the children of this age marry but they do not marry in heaven, he is not putting down marriage. He may be telling us to learn to start loving one person deeply. But the reason he says heaven will not be about marriage is because heaven is a universal connection not just with one person but with everything and everybody. Before we can learn to love everything and everybody, we have to learn to love one person here and now; that is the only way to expand your soul and make it ready for heaven. If you can’t start with loving the person you’re married to, start with loving a goldfish, move up to loving the cat, then the dog, then your spouse, and then do something unbelievable—love your enemy! The point of heaven, the afterlife, the resurrection, is the absolute affirmation of God’s goodness, God’s justice, God’s truth. Even the worst, inhumane scenario here on earth cannot be a complete and absolute disaster. These readings about resurrection are permanent reminders to all of us that what we see isn’t all there is. Our feeble efforts to make a just and better world don’t happen in a vacuum. God is at work in these little efforts, and in the dying and rising of Jesus, God affirms and guarantees the ultimate victory of love and life.

Fr. Phil Mulligan