Some Sadducees put a question to Jesus. The Sadducees do not come across here or elsewhere as a very admirable or attractive group. Josephus tells us that they dominated the Jewish aristocracy and the Temple Priesthood at this time. Therefore their relationship with the ruling powers, the dynasty of King Herod, and the Roman Empire, was one of collaboration and appeasement. For them, so long as the Temple cult kept going, and so long as their own status and influence were maintained, religion had to be a matter of accommodation and compromise. Not for them the zeal of the Maccabees, whom they would have condemned as deplorable fanatics, backward-looking extremists, rigid-minded fundamentalists; and therefore obstacles to peaceful coexistence and social progress.
The Sadducees didn’t like Jesus. They knew his teaching on the indissolubility of marriage (Lk 16:18), and found it shocking. They knew also what he said about God’s Kingdom, and how after death the virtuous will be rewarded and the wicked punished (cf. e.g. Lk 16:19ff.). They would scoff at that, as so much myth and superstition. We can well imagine how they would have reacted on hearing what Jesus said at the tomb of Lazarus, shortly before Holy Week, as recorded by St. John: I am the Resurrection (11:25). So now they think up a question for him, merely a trick, a reductio ad absurdum, designed to embarrass and confound.
What Jesus says in response is most helpful for us, maybe above all at this time. I say this on three counts. First, because this clear teaching about the after life is very pertinent in the month of November, and today on Remembrance Sunday, when our thoughts turn to the mystery of death, and to what happens after death, and to prayer for the holy souls. Then secondly, the words of Jesus are helpful for us at this time when not only is marriage being ever more radically undermined in our society, but also now within the Church the ideal of Priestly celibacy is coming under renewed and heavy attack. And thirdly, the words of Jesus are especially helpful for our community at this time, as together we begin our annual retreat.
In theory the Sadducees were believers in the one true God of Israel, and faithful disciples of Moses. But these worldly men had no use for any unseen, supernatural world, and they mocked the ideas both of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the Body. To use the expression of Jesus, they were “Sons of this age”. That is, they belonged entirely to it, found all their delight in it, and failed to see anything beyond it. Thereby they made themselves unworthy of “that age”, the other age, the one that has already started but is also yet to come. The whole of the Old Testament pointed towards that age. Jesus came to inaugurate it, and to open it up for all who would follow him. He calls those who belong to it, explicitly both male and female, “Sons of the resurrection and Sons of God”. Such people already belong totally to God; their life is defined by their relationship with Jesus; they look forward to their promised inheritance of eternal life, to heaven, with eager longing. There at last they will live in God’s presence without any impediment whatever, like the Angels, in purity and endless joy. Unlike the Angels, though, they will rejoice there in the perfection of their humanity, in both body and soul.
We rightly think of the Catholic faith as standing strongly pro-marriage and pro-life. So it does, thank God, and that can never be compromised. But still, in today’s Gospel Jesus relativises both marriage and human life. Marriage for us is holy and sacred, because it’s a sign of the union of Christ and his Church. But it’s only a sign, not itself an absolute. You don’t have to be married, and of itself marriage can’t make you perfectly happy. In heaven, there will most certainly be love, and friendship, and mutual belonging and support, but there will be no marriage. As for human life: that too, we say, is sacred, and holy, because there is no one for whom Christ has not died. But death is not the ultimate disaster, nor the final end. On the contrary, death is for us the doorway to an infinitely better, happier life with God forever.
What about the ideal of Priestly celibacy? We all know the arguments for the relaxation of the present discipline regarding it. However passionately these arguments are advocated, many of us find ourselves unconvinced by them. More disturbingly though, we sometimes seem to discern beneath them an embarrassment over the very idea of celibacy. The Sadducees have their successors, alive and well, in our own day. Plenty of modern Christians want to live in terms of friendship and peace with the present ruling powers, and they are ready for compromise in order to achieve that. They want to retain their faith, but suitably accommodated to the spirit of this secular and pluralist age. So they are uncomfortable when people make a radical renunciation in this life, for the sake of a greater reward in the next. The celibacy of the clergy seems to be a sort of rebuke to their worldliness. They regard it as an anachronism in this day and age, and they long for it to be done away with. For us, by contrast, the celibate clergy is a most precious sign of the Kingdom. We pray for all our Priests, and we pray for many generous young men to offer themselves for this irreplaceable ministry in the future.
Our community has recently been listening in the refectory to a biography of Saint Rafael Arnaiz Baron. He died aged just 27 as a result of his diabetes in a Trappist monastery in Spain in 1938. His message fits very well with today’s Gospel, and with our community retreat, which began last night. God alone! God alone! God alone! cried Rafael. Take away everything whatever from me; my possessions, my family, my friends, my health, even my ability to live the Trappist life as I desire. If I have God, I am rich indeed. God is sufficient for me; he is my all; even in this life, so full of sufferings and tears. For him I am ready to renounce anything whatever, and to bear any suffering. All I want is to be united ever more deeply with Jesus, who alone is all my love and all my joy, and who promises me a blissful eternity of life in him.