Written by Is there such a thing as life after death? If there is, what will be the state of our relationships with the people we have known and loved here on earth? Will we still be married to our partners? Both the First Reading and the Gospel for today’s Mass deal with these questions.
The first real mention in the Bible of resurrection of the dead is in the Old Testament’s Book of Daniel, written less than 200 years before the time of Christ. From then onwards faith in the afterlife grew and became a standard teaching among some groups of Jews, including Jesus. However, one group, the Sadducees, rejected this belief since it could not be proved from the first five books of the Bible, known as the Pentateuch, the only books they recognised as Sacred Scripture.
In today’s Gospel the Sadducees try to ridicule the idea of resurrection by referring to an old Jewish custom that required a brother-in-law to marry his dead brother’s wife and have a child with her to provide a legal heir for the man who had died. The principle behind this was that a widow was forbidden to remarry outside her deceased husband’s family (probably to prevent alienation of property). If there is resurrection, the Sadducees ask, what happens in the case of a woman who has to marry, in turn, six of her dead husband’s brothers before a lawful heir is produced? Whose wife will she be in the life after death?
In true robust rabbinical debating style, Jesus replies by quoting a text from one of the five books of the Bible the Sadducees accepted. He quotes a statement from the Book of Exodus in which God speaks to Moses of the dead Patriarchs in the present tense: ‘I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ – not ‘I was’ their God but ‘I am’ their God, meaning that to God Abraham, Isaac and Jacob must be still alive. Jesus argues from this text that God is a God of the living, and the God for whom all people are alive even after they die.
This argument may seem odd to us but it is the way rabbis argued at the time. For them each word there in Scripture could convey its own meaning.
As for marriage in the afterlife, Jesus’ reply is based on the common understanding of marriage at that time. By our standards today, marriage then was oppressive as its function was primarily to produce new human life. There was no understanding of the complexity of human relationships as we experience them today: society then knew nothing of people freely choosing their partners, couples living together before marrying, gender fluidity, same sex relationships, egg donation, in vitro fertilisation, surrogacy or the possibility of a man giving birth. Couples, who were chosen for each other by their families, did not live together before marriage which then was solely between men and women. While people then could be happily married, their primary role as married people was to produce children.
Consequently, for Jesus and fellow likeminded people, marriage was necessary only for this side of life where people die. As ‘heaven’ was a place where people no longer died, people did not need to be married there. (And how liberating this may have sounded to women who would be free of a life of child bearing?) For Jesus, life after the resurrection would be different from life as we know it here on earth but it would be one in which we remain alive to God.
Some people have interpreted Our Lord’s reply to the Sadducees to claim that there is no sexual activity in heaven [as sex purely for procreation is no longer required]. In reply, others ask that if this is so, how can it be heaven?
If for you ‘seeing is believing’, there is no tangible proof for you of the resurrection to new life. Jesus used the phrase “children of the resurrection” to refer to his followers as people who believe in something that cannot be scientifically proven. But isn’t life full of similar challenges when we believe in something we cannot prove –in another person, in a cause or in the value of a particular course of action? Isn’t there more to life than what we can merly see?
As St Paul reminds us, Christians ‘walk by faith and not by sight’ (2 Corinthians 5:7). In this faith – which is not certainty – we are pilgrims with the hope that all who have been dear to us here on earth will remain close to us in heaven.
Michael Campion
Holy Name, Jesmond
6 November 2022
Sunday Mass: Saturday 4pm, Sunday 10am 