In both the first reading today from the book of Tobit and in the Holy Gospel according
to Mark, we have a woman who is married off one by one to seven brothers, all who die.
In the case of Sarah from the book of Tobit, she was obsessed, you might say, by the demon
Asmodeus and her husbands are murdered on her wedding night before they have an opportunity
to consummate the marriage.
In the reading from the Gospel of Mark, we have the parable of the woman who is married
seven times.
And to the brothers one by one, leaving no children, and then she too dies.
And the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, really did not
believe in eternal life, have this question for our Lord, posing it to him as a kind of
trap, believing that his teaching was inherently contradictory and that he would crumble under
their objection.
Yet, of course, our Lord...
Our Lord does not crumble because he ultimately brings the teaching of eternal life and not
only the teaching and the truth that we are all destined for heaven, but he himself passes
through the veil of death and brings the life of the resurrection to each and every one
of us.
And when Sarah prayed for death because of her sorrows...
Sorrows and difficulties and being even rebuked by her own servants, she turned to the Lord.
And that was at the moment in which the angel Raphael was sent to her and to Tobit, and
she was ultimately delivered.
And her deliverance and the deliverance of Tobit looks forward to the resurrection of
Christ from the dead.
When Christ will not only restore to us...
The things that we would like to have in this temporal life, but restores to us the
life of God in all its fullness, we look forward to heaven if only we are willing to humble
ourselves before God.
The attitude of Sarah as opposed to the attitude of the Sadducees was, of course, very different
as well.
She in her weakness contemplated suicide, but then thought better of it.
She turned to the Lord in prayer.
Certainly she prayed for death, but she ultimately was willing to accept the will of God, and
that she did.
And it all turned out well for her in the end.
She ended up marrying the young Tobias, having been joined to him by the angel Raphael.
In the case of the Sadducees, of course, their whole involvement in this case is simply a
matter of trying to trip the Lord up, a complete lack of humility.
And, of course, it went...
It went nowhere for them.
Today we celebrate the memorial of St. Norbert.
He was a medieval canon, basically a secular priest who was well-positioned in his diocese
and had a benefice, a good salary, and he was living in a time of great corruption.
And he himself fell into that kind of corruption.
He even would have...
Sometimes he would pay someone to come into the cathedral and pray the office for him,
because one of the duties of the canon was to pray the office publicly among all the
other canons.
And so sometimes he'd have things to do, and he would pay somebody to do it for him.
And that was...
That kind of behavior at the time was very typical.
And then he went through a conversion, and he realized that he needed to change his life.
So he started becoming a better priest and studying.
And, you know, discovering better his duties and trying to put them into action.
And he tried then to reform the other priests of the cathedral where he was at.
And that didn't go over very well.
They weren't not too eager to listen to him and rebuked him and sort of ostracized him.
And so he decided that he needed to found a religious community.
And so he became basically a monk.
And through the monastic...