In the ancient world critics of the belief that human beings live again after they die had a number of arguments which they thought showed how absurd such a belief is. Where will everybody fit if we are raised with new bodies, all billions of us? If lands and houses have belonged to different families across the centuries who will own the property or house in the next life? The Sadducees, the high priestly group, present one of these arguments to Jesus in today's gospel: if someone has been married more than once, to whom will he or she be married in the afterlife?
Of course our faith is not in an 'afterlife' if by that we mean something more or less like what we know now except happier, without problems and never-ending. Jesus corrects them, and in doing so reminds us immediately of important aspects of our faith. It is not so much that we believe in a doctrine as it is that we believe in God. Our faith is theological, meaning it has God for its direct object and the doctrines of the faith, or articles of the creed, are believed because they have something to do with God - they teach us something about what God is like, something about how God has acted, something about the hope in God which comes through the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Jesus teaches them that God is not a God of resuscitation or of suspended animation but a God of life, God of the living, a God in whose presence men and women can only be alive, God who wants for us the fulness of life. Sure, that life will be eternal, everlasting, so there is no need for reproduction of the species there.
In what else will it consist then, this eternal life? It means knowing God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. It means being transformed into the glory of the Risen Lord, bringing with us the wounds we have sustained in this life but even those wounds will serve the manifestation of God's glory. It means knowing as fully as we are known. It means becoming like God because we shall see him as he really is.
'The glory of God is the human being fully alive' is a statement often quoted from Saint Irenaeus of Lyon. But the second part of his sentence is rarely quoted: it says that 'the life of the human being is the vision of God'. This is what Jesus tries to teach his listeners in responding to the skepticism of the Sadducees. Believe in the life of the world to come, he says, but inform yourselves about that world which is coming, the kingdom he is establishing. If you know something about the kingdom of God then you will know something about what our living in that kingdom will entail: knowing and loving God, as we are known and loved by God.
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