“Oh, That’s easy to answer,” came the confident reply: “I just go out like a light.” After a moments silence to digest that answer there came a second question: "What if there is someone waiting to switch you on again?"
Our Readings today all look forward.
The first reading is a stirring account of the martyrdom of a mother and her 7 sons. We hear only a portion of the story today, the first half, which describes part of the Jewish resistance against a foreign conqueror, 150 years before Jesus’ life.
What we have here are the main statements of belief made by the brothers as they go to their deaths because they bare unwilling to eat Pork:
1st Brother – Reason for the resistance: Faithfulness to God’s Law
2nd Brother – Expresses a belief in the afterlife
3rd Brother – this new life will involve a Resurrection of the Body
4th Brother – There will be no new life for their persecutors - there are consequences to our actions on earth!
This passage is one of earliest Biblical texts affirming life after death. The Sadducees did not believe in the Resurrection and so they tried to trap Jesus using an old and little-used law
to discount thoughts of an afterlife.
The law was designed to ensure one who died childless would, through his Brother, have an heir to preserve his name.
But Jesus shows the Sadducees that the Law they quoted would not be relevant in heaven. The dead will already possess the Kingdom. There is no need of an Heir. All is already inherited!
As we come in November – remembering our faithful departed, our liturgy looks to the Future - and at this table – we have a glimpse – a taste of the inheritance promised for each of us in the Kingdom!
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