Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time – C

The Sadducees denied belief in the resurrection and they wanted to test Jesus in order to entrap him in some type of error. They asked him a challenging question about a woman who had seven husbands, in order to show how unrealistic it is to believe in the resurrection, because in heaven she could not be the wife of all the men she married during her lifetime. Jesus does not allow himself to be deceived by the Sadducees and he therefore responds by calmly teaching them on the truth of the resurrection: “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.” Heavenly life will be different from our earthly life, because we are going to be different. But who are those considered worthy to attain to the coming age and the resurrection from the dead, if not the ones who already believe in God and his promises? These are the men and women who live now with their hearts set on heaven and eternal life, not to the earth or the things of this world.

The Lord Jesus goes even further on the subject of the resurrection and says: “That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush, when he called out ‘Lord,’ the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob; and he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive!” God instead of taking a proper name for himself, prefers to be called by the names of his beloved children. This confirms his immense love and how close he is to us. Our God is the God of the living because even death cannot break the covenant that he has made with us through his Son Jesus Christ. The Lord is the God therefore of my grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, all those who have lived before me and who believed in him. He is the God of all those who know him as Father, who so loves his children that he gives them not only life on earth but eternal life as well.

Each of us has his or her own name that we received on the day of our Baptism. The priest who baptized us solemnly uttered our name at that moment and invoked upon us the name of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, so that we would be consecrated by the Lord’s name and thereby become children of God. People recognize us and call us by our name and Jesus confirms that God knows the name of his loyal believers “For to him all are alive!” God is our life and he lives in us when we believe in Him and live as his beloved children.