The question about The Resurrection

How time flies indeed, just a week ago the whole country was observing All Saints and All Souls Day, when millions of Filipinos trooped to the cemeteries to remember those who have gone ahead of us in the great beyond. Let’s fast forward to today’s Gospel, which teaches us about the resurrection. This is the question brought by the Sadducees to our Lord Jesus Christ about the resurrection. You can read it in Luke 20: 27-38.

“27 Some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, came forward and put this question to [Jesus], 28 saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us, ‘if someone’s brother dies leaving a wife but no child, his brother must take the wife and raise up descendants for his brother.’ 29 Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman but died childless. 30 Then the second 31 and the third married her, and likewise all the seven died childless.

32 Finally the woman died also died. 33 Now at the resurrection whose wife will that woman be? For all seven had been married to her?” 34 Jesus said to them, “The children of this age marry and remarry, 35 but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. 36 They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise.

37 That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush, when he called ‘Lord’ the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob 38 and he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”

After the infamous 9/11 when the commercial airliners were deliberately crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, the whole world woke up to the reality that still haunts us today… terrorism, which was brought to a new level by the Al Qaeda terror group. It was then that the whole world began to take terrorism seriously that we were facing Muslim extremists at its worse.

After the dramatic collapse of the Twin Towers showed on CNN and BBC, people began to ask, why do these people do such things? What kind of reward would a Jihadist get for that suicide mission? It was also then that we were appraised by many pundits that supposedly the Holy Quran (Koran) promised a terrorist Martyrdom and the a reward of Martyrs are 72 virgins awaiting him when he gets to heaven. Let me point out that I have only read these stories from magazines and newspapers, but never got to read the Koran to get a direct quote because I never saw a Koran in English.

But anyway, this idea is not far from the thinking of the Sadducees who think that the woman who got married to seven brothers would now have sex with all of them because after all they are all married to her. Perhaps the idea of many people about heaven or paradise is that, it is like a huge Playboy mansion where you can have all the earthly pleasures that were denied to you while you were still on earth.

But our Lord Jesus Christ was very clear on this when he told them, “The children of this age marry and remarry, but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise.”

In short, getting married and remarrying happens only in our time here on earth. But once we have died, the body and the soul get separated. Our bodies are placed in a vault in cemeteries on in an urn if we are cremated, while our souls would go either to heaven, purgatory of hell, depending of course of the gravity of the person’s sin.

But during the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ or the Resurrection of the Dead, I have read that our bodies and souls would get reunited, but we would already be like angels… or spirit beings. In short, there’s no more sex in heaven, because ecstasy has been redefined not in human or earthly terms, but in divine terms. Being in the presence of God is already an ecstasy that we’ve never known here on earth. It must be very good in heaven, I have never heard of a soul that returned from there.

This question was posed by the Sadducees, a Jewish group that doesn’t believe in the afterlife. But for us Christians, the Resurrection of the Dead is central to our faith. If our Lord Jesus Christ died on the cross and failed to resurrect, then he did not conquer death at all. But Jesus Christ did resurrect and there are many witnesses who saw him… one amongst them is the doubting Thomas or Didymus, who after touching the wounds of Jesus knelt and proclaimed, “My Lord and my God!”

***

For email responses to this article, write to [email protected] or [email protected]. His columns can be accessed through www.philstar.com.