The Sadducees were members of an ancient group composed mostly of Jewish priests and legal scholars more conservative than the Pharisees and certainly more rigid than Jesus. They were old school and old money and their influence was definitely on the wane, a theological and cultural movement at the very twilight of their history and influence. Although Mark and Matthew mention them with some regularity, this is the only event in which they appear in Luke’s Gospel.
The Sadducees remind us of those people who are sit up front at a meeting and then raise their hands at the earliest possible moment and ask a question that can only be generically answered but never addressed directly because politeness demands that we never offend anyone as “there are no stupid questions.”
Jesus helps us to navigate those moments as we see them in the various movements and issues that surface in our parishes, our Diocese and within the Church universal, and as we confront those who challenge the faith with all those illogically framed objections. The proliferation of news sources and bloggers often serves only to muddy the waters instead of being helpful to us.
Jesus leads us down a path that we must be careful in walking. In many ways he upended Jewish tradition while at the same time remaining ever faithful to that tradition. Jesus faced opposition from all groups in the Jewish tradition. The Sadducees use here a classic absurdity to try and trap Jesus. They did not believe in eternal life and so they posed what might seem like an innocent question regarding a woman who has been married seven times. Whose wife will she be in the afterlife?
Like the people who attempt to belittle our religious beliefs by asking us crazy questions the Sadducees think that they got Jesus on the ropes. We encounter such challenges anytime someone confronts us with a question or idea that they are convinced will undermine the foundation of our faith. If only we saw it their way we would not be so stupid as to believe in all of this religious nonsense.
All too often this attitude is present in the academic circles where we entrust our children and young adults. The use of false arguments and intelligent sounding babble can often confuse and then undermine the faith that we have instilled in them. The power of the group is important. Notice that Jesus was not confronted by one single Sadduccee but rather by a group of them. There is strength in numbers and the hope of the pressure of a group to conform to their way of thinking was powerful. It was not powerful enough certainly, nor should it ever be for us.
In confronting this “wisdom” of the Sadduccees and the absurdity of their challenge to Jesus regarding the nature of the resurrection there are some important lessons for us.
We cannot allow ourselves to get so caught up in the wisdom of the world that we fail to maintain sight of the wisdom of the ages, of revealed truths in the Scripture and the Tradition of the Church. We like to think of ourselves as more sophisticated but we just tend to be more neurotic instead.
Second, we also should pay some more attention to the inevitable future of our lives. We should not just assume that eternity is simply a state of our imagination and a continuation of what we want life to be. There are real demands of faith that cannot be reduced to mere absurdities.
Nov. 13 – We see hope in the face of destruction
A sense of hopelessness seems to be pervasive in our society. That lack of hope – while not often specifically recognized by those who suffer – manifests itself in many ways: drug use, suicide, and a general feeling of malaise or depression.
When we are young and healthy with the world open before us we tend to define hope in terms of personal goals. We join our hopes and our dreams and view them synonymously. Our hope is what we hope towards a defined future.
As we get older and begin to separate ourselves from what we have acquired and our youthful dreams fade into the reality of what is, our sense of hope either fades into oblivion or becomes more esoteric – we hope for the intangibles like peace, security, a sense of belonging. When all that stands before us is death, the question then has to be fully faced – what is hope?
While Jesus does not use the word hope in the Gospel, it is the context of the reading that lays open before us the problem of hope.
Standing in the courtyard of the then yet unfinished magnificent Temple in Jerusalem, Jesus announces a day is coming when that temple will be totally destroyed. Such a bold statement was seen as absurd by the crowd gathered around him. The Jews were at peace with the Romans and they were, by and large, enjoying prosperity. By the time that Jesus arrives at the Temple it covered about 40 acres, or roughly one-quarter of the area of the city of Jerusalem. It was the largest religious building project in Rome. The edifice was whitewashed, gilded with gold leaf, and stood as a shimmering beacon to Roman and Jewish engineering and design. The Jews stood in awe of the beauty of this resplendent testimony to the majesty of God.
Jesus, listening to some pilgrims comment on the splendor of the temple drives home the point that he foresaw the day when not even one stone would be left standing on top of another. The temple would be brought down. Needless to say, those who heard Jesus were confounded and asked him the question as to when, how and why such a horror could occur. They knew full well the implications of such a prediction. It would take nothing short of a major disaster – natural or human – to topple the complex of structures there.
By the time Luke’s Gospel was written the temple had been destroyed by the full brute force of the Roman army. The sufferings which Jesus foresaw had been fulfilled and the end of the glorious time of the Jews in Jerusalem had come to a horrific end. At its face, this prediction of Jesus has been fulfilled.
Yet, this prophetic utterance by Jesus carries far more significance than the events of 70AD. Jesus looks well beyond the destruction of that temple or, indeed, the destruction of any impressive human accomplishment, and sees the end times; the completion of God’s creation through the eschatological moment.
When we watch the news and see the pictures of destroyed cities and villages and of desperate people fleeing the war in Syria, or the devastation of flooding in Haiti gather a sense of the desperation that the Jews felt over the days of the siege of Jerusalem. Often we ponder whether this is “it” is the end upon us. Certainly the Jews fleeing the city wondered the same themselves. In the face of any horror – natural or human caused — we have only two possible responses dread or hope. It is only through our commitment to the Paschal Mystery accomplished though Christ that hope in the face of finality can be realized.
We cannot allow ourselves to be overcome with dread and hopelessness no matter how dreadful it might look now. Jesus knew there would be a new Jerusalem just as we know that the finality of this life is not the end of life itself.
Father Garry Koch is pastor of St. Benedict Parish, Holmdel.