todays GOSPEL by Cyriacus Elelleh When spiritual ignorance mixes with arrogance, it’s no more a spiritual mistake Last week the figure of Zacchaeus encouraged us to make sure we do not stop at broadcasting our repentance but to undertake actions that are in tandem with the new life we have embraced. Among those required actions, one that has immediate appeal is restitution which Zacchaeus did not wait to be told. Today, we continue to read the same gospel of Luke that presented the Zacchaeus’ story. At face value, it seems as if Luke introduced something very different from the ongoing discussion. However, this is not so. One group of people that appeared in the Zacchaeus story and who have acted an adversarial role in the ministry of Jesus is the Pharisees. They are the people who believed they would be saved by the observance of the Law thereby making Jesus’ birth and especially death, superfluous events. Although they were a religious sect, believing in the Old Testament and rabbinical rules, they were becoming at the time of Jesus, more political than political parties. This led them to a vigorous clamp down on any person or group with divergent views. They made Jesus their avowed enemy. But apart from Jesus, there was another group of Jewish extraction: the Sadducees who believed only in the Old Testament. They did not accept rabbinical rules as authentic rule of faith. Jesus used today’s gospel to show that he was not a politician and did not come to establish a political group rather he had come to establish the truth and confirm such where it already exists no matter where. In teaching this lesson, Jesus uses that same opportunity to point out something very particular that could explain the dogged attitude of the Pharisees. They had a wrong idea of their finality. This could be a very basic issue for if someone is not sure where one is going, you can be sure the entire journey will affected. But Jesus’ intervention in today’s gospel revealed something more interesting: spiritual ignorance. This is why we believe it is only on a closer look that one would see that Luke did not introduce any new topic. The Pharisees did believe in resurrection. The Sadducees did not. In today’s gospel Jesus taught that there is resurrection. My very close colleague very often says that there is a difference between a mistake and ignorance. I see that at play here. Jesus had become convinced that a group of people were perishing on the altar of spiritual ignorance. Anytime whether immediately or later that a light is thrown on something and a speaker or actor withdraws and says “I am sorry”, he shows he has made a mistake. When even after a light has been thrown whether immediately or later exposing error but the actor or speaker maintains his ground, it is no longer in the avenue of a mistake. This is the point where this gospel is a continuation of the previous ones. This time around it involves a group that was in the avenue of mistake. Unlike their Pharisee counterparts who would always ask question to entrap Jesus, the Sadducees today asked Jesus a question for the purpose of clarification: “Some Sadducees came forward (the ones who hold there is no resurrection) to pose this problem to Jesus.” They had good argument based on what Moses had taught. They came to the true master, not to test him but to test the veracity of their belief. They went to submit that belief to the true teacher of all times. They used a story of a woman who had married seven brothers successively in accord with the teaching Moses gave them. Their question: “At the resurrection, whose wife will she be since she had been married to all seven?” That Jesus approved of the resurrection was good news to the Pharisees. But Jesus was not preaching there doctrine, he was preaching the truth. Yet, there is on closer look a lesson for both groups. The Sadducees got it completely wrong and they were called to rethink. We were not told what their reaction was after Jesus’ answer but we can guess that some of them repented. On their own part, it was not total victory for the Pharisees for Jesus had a message for them too. In fact, their situation was worse than that of the Sadducees. They had to learn what true resurrection consists in. This is true because resurrection is not reincarnation which was the Pharisaic concept of it. It is not an act where people who have lived according to the tradition of the fathers are given protection by the land and then made to spring up again in a new being. It is not a natural phenomenon. It is because the Pharisees saw resurrection as a natural phenomenon that they felt they can achieve it by living strictly in accordance with the Law and for them he who did this surely resurrected. What would the Pharisees have answered if they were the ones asked this question? Their conception of the resurrection did not have the insight of Jesus’ answer. So the Lord clears the point about resurrection: “The children of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those judged worthy of a place in the age to come and of resurrection from the dead do not. They become like angels and are no longer liable to death.” This answer shows that the Sadducees had no idea what resurrection looks like, neither did the Pharisees. Marriage is an act God instituted to increase and multiply the world and to preserve it in being. Just as our practice of truth, justice, love is a poor copy of divine truth, justice, and love, so is marriage a poor copy and shadow of “eternity”. We get this in genealogy. Through it, God sustains the world and will do so as long as He wills it. Resurrection is the destruction of or better, defeat of death. The one who resurrects does not have to fight death anymore. Therefore he will not die again. If God used marriage to sustain human life in a transient state where human beings are subject to death, marriage would have outlived its usefulness in a state where death is no more a threat. Thus Jesus tells his audience that at resurrection, human beings would be like angels, undying and so needing nothing to be preserved. This is why it is a gate to transcendence into the supernatural. It is this quality that is lacking in the pharisaic idea of the resurrection and which Jesus was at the same time correcting. But did the Pharisees change? Did they even know Jesus had a serious lesson for them? A good number of them did not because they even attacked and tried to deny Jesus’ own resurrection. There is a trend in the behavior of the Pharisees that runs till today. ‘Unrepentance’ results when ignorance mixes with arrogance. The result is for one to think that the message of repentance is for others. The next verse following where the gospel of today stopped says “Some of the teachers of the law responded, “Well said, teacher!” (Lk.20:39). These are people who should have reflected on the new teaching they heard assuming the work of an umpire between Jesus and the Sadducees. It was then as now, the reason why many people are no longer making mistakes in the spiritual arena, they are ignorantly arrogant. In this Mass, we must pray first and foremost for ourselves that our spiritual errors become nothing but spiritual mistakes which we acknowledge and regret, redress and possibly restitute. As mistakes, our errors are misdeeds or misjudgments appealing for divine illumination and when that comes, we bow our heads and pray for the forgiveness of the almighty. On the other hand, we pray for people who even after divine light has exposed their errors to be so, hang on there for “other” reasons, that the same illumination and the love of God that are never extinguished provide them the will to know that everything is worth dropping which will not have us experience the resurrection and eternity where all imperfect love will give way to everlasting love and life. Holding to our pride or position or wealth in illumined error can rob us the privilege of answering children of the resurrection: eternal children of God. In all, may we all know when the searchlight God’s converting love is beamed on us so we don’t pass away our blessings. May we, by the light of the grace of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, do all we must to remain children of God in life and in death.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Nov 2013 23:26:43 +0000
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