Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
It's very interesting that the Sadducees, the ones who didn't even believe in the resurrection at all,
were the ones who posed this question to our Lord.
And our Lord realized that they were just asking the question, trying to trip Him up.
There was no point in someone or a group like the Sadducees to be asking our Lord about the resurrection
or what's going to happen in heaven because they didn't even believe in heaven themselves in a way
because they didn't believe in the resurrection from the dead.
And our Lord corrects them and He basically moves around the point that they're trying to make
right to the heart of the matter.
And He basically tells them,
You don't believe in the resurrection, so here's the answer.
And He tells them that God is the God of the living and not the dead.
Because the fact is that our Lord said, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
But in a way, they had all died previously when He was talking with Moses.
But if He was talking about He...
as if He presently was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
then they must have still been alive.
So what He's saying is that all are alive in Him.
Those who die in His friendship go to heaven and in the end they will rise with Him.
They will rise because they are called sons of God.
And they are united to Him.
Or they participate in His very life through grace.
So He's basically telling them, you know, in the passage about the burning bush,
that the dead rise again because, as I said, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still alive.
And this was the heart of the matter.
The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection.
They were trying to...
basically discount our Lord's words.
They were trying to trip Him up so that followers would go away from our Lord
and start following them.
But our Lord gets to the heart of the matter
just as the sons in the book of Maccabees,
the sons or the seven brothers with their mother who were arrested and tortured,
they went to the heart of the matter when they were being...
tortured, they realized that they were being tortured for the resurrection of the dead.
In other words, they were being tortured for everything that they placed their hope in.
And all of us basically live our Catholic faith.
We live our Catholic faith based on the hope in the resurrection.
St. Paul talks about this.
If our Lord did not rise again,
then our faith is...
is in vain.
Because our Lord rose again,
we too will rise.
If our Lord did not rise,
then our St. Paul said,
the preaching is fruitless.
Because that is why He placed all His hope.
It is in the resurrection from the dead.
It is in the resurrection of our Lord
that He placed all of His hope.
Because if our Lord rose again,
then that means...
that we will rise again.
Because we are followers of Him
and we live by His grace.
And the very power that our Lord had
by which He arose from the dead
is the very power that He imparts to us
through His grace.
Because it is through His grace that we participate in His very life.
And it is by this life principle,
you know, other than our soul.
Our soul is the life of the body.
But...
the grace of God
is actually the life of our soul.
So...
those who die without that life of grace,
those who die without that life of God,
will die, as St. Francis said,
the second death.
Meaning that they will go to hell.
But those who die in the friendship of God,
as our Lord said,
or as St. Paul said,
that we are all...
children of God,
then we will go to heaven
because that grace that's in our soul
is the means by which we participate
in the life of God.
Because that grace is the life of God.
And this is what we place our hope in.
That one day we'll be in heaven
with all the saints,
with all the angels,
with the Blessed Virgin Mary,
seeing God face to face.
But we also believe
that we will
not just lose our bodies,
but our bodies will be united
to our souls once again.
Because unless our bodies
are united to our souls,
we are not complete persons.
You know, as human beings,
we are meant to be
soul and body,
united.
And it was never intended
by God when He created man
that the soul would be separated
from the body.
So that is one of the gifts
that our Lord is going to give us
on the last day
is that the soul will be united again
with the body
and the body will share
in the glories
that are to be revealed in heaven.
So what does the resurrection
mean for us on a practical level
in our day-to-day lives?
Well, the resurrection
is something that we place our hope in.
First of all, the resurrection
of our lives.
Because the resurrection
is one of the primary
basis of our faith.
You know, that is one of the
primary criteria for our faith.
That is one of the main miracles
that our Lord worked in order to prove
His divinity.
Our Lord told everyone that there would be a sign
and that He would give them
the sign of Jonah.
That as Jonah was in the belly of a whale
for three days and three nights,
that our Lord would be in the belly
of the earth.
And then on the third day
rise again.
And this was one of the
greatest miracles that our Lord
worked in order to prove His divinity
and also
prove to all those who
would come after Him
generations upon
generations who
hearing the gospel
would believe
in the resurrection
and would see, have proof
to
place all their trust in our Lord
and faith in His
words and to carry out
in their lives
what those words of our
Lord meant.
That is to live
holy lives, become perfect as our
Heavenly Father is perfect.
So it may not seem
that way because most of us
believe in
all the teachings of the church
from the time we were little kids because
our parents
know they imparted the faith to us.
But
if we dig deeper
into our faith we will realize
that miracles and prophecy
are the greatest
criteria for
putting our faith in our Lord.
I've said it many times that our Lord
was not just a man,
He was also God.
But He appeared to be only a man
to those He came in contact with
and the only thing at the start
that set Him apart
from
send anyone else
was the fact that He was able
to work a miracle.
He worked the miracle at the wedding of Cana
and that's what started His public
ministry. And all those miracles
are in a way a reflection
of the resurrection
from the dead.
Our Lord's resurrection first of all
and then our resurrection in the
end and the glories
of heaven. All those miracles
show that it is God
working through someone
and within our Lord's case, not just working through him, but that he is God
because later on he also accepts the worship that's due to God alone.
So there are many reasons why we can believe in our Lord,
you know, that he had eloquent words that, as the guards that went to capture him said,
no one spoke like this man before.
But the main things, and also our Lord's perfection, his very life,
not even his enemies could bring up anything against him.
So there are other reasons, but the main reasons at the beginning, you know,
were the fact that he required this great faith of people and he worked miracles
in order to give them sort of a springboard to make that act of faith.
And that is what they did.
Many people did, many people didn't, like the Sadducees.
They basically just tried to trip him up.
But in the end, those who accept those miracles, who accept the words of our Lord,
will one day, and who are constant in their faith, the faith that our Lord required of them,
will be like, will be given the strength that the seven brothers with their mother were given.
You know, in this...
In this reading, we hear that even the children basically didn't,
or basically had the courage of some of the greatest martyrs.
And they did become some of the greatest martyrs.
And it's because they placed their hope in the resurrection of the dead.
They knew that one day they would receive their bodies and that it wasn't worth, you know,
all the gold in the world.
It wasn't worth all the power in the world.
It wasn't worth, you know, everything in the world to lose their souls.
And they told this to the man who was torturing them.
And this is the faith that they died by.
It is my choice to die at the hands of men with the God-given hope of being restored to life by him.
But for you, there will be no resurrection to life.
And these people who, in ages past and even now,
who persecute the Catholic Church,
the Catholic faith,
are basically those who do not place any hope in the resurrection.
They do not have any hope, so they're living for this life.
They live for this life and they persecute those who live for the next life,
just as we read in the book of Maccabees.
But we have to keep our faith as strong as they did.
We have to look to the resurrection.
We have to look to where we...
We have to replace our hope and all the truths of the Catholic faith
and in the reward that will be ours.
When we die, we go to heaven.
And on the last day, we receive our bodies glorified back again.
And we will understand how it was that our Lord imparted the strength to us
to live our faith day to day.
And...
It is primarily through the hope in the resurrection
because the resurrection represents for us
everything that our Lord promised would come to us,
especially union with Him
after we have lived a life faithful to Him
and truly a life that's worthy of being called a son of God.
Alleluia!