32nd Sunday Year C - Homily 5

 Homily 5 - 2019

In today’s Gospel, the Sadducees had a problem. They were the conservative wing of the Jewish people – generally from wealthy families, many of them influential priests, mainly resident in Jerusalem, prepared to collaborate with the Roman occupying power, satisfied with the status quo and opposed to anything new. From the religious point of view, they accepted only the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, allegedly composed by Moses. Everything else, even the prophets, were too risky, too “avant garde” for them. They had no time for religious ideas about life after death, for example, which had begun to gain ground among the population generally only over the last couple of centuries.

What is more, even when the Sadducees read the first five books of the Bible, they read them with a fundamentalist, literalist, mindset. It was their literalist understanding of one of those five books, the Book of Leviticus, that was responsible for the absurd scenario they posed to Jesus about the woman consecutively married to seven brothers.

Jesus accepted those same five books – and the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures as well; but Jesus did not accept them literally. He read them, not fixated on the words, but on the meanings conveyed by the words, the meanings and values behind the words. He used his imagination. He used his intelligence. He drew on his sense of the meaning and thrust of the Scriptures as a whole. Matthew quoted him as saying in his Sermon on the Mount, "I have come, not to destroy the Law but to fulfill it.” In the process, Jesus actually contradicted the literal wording of some of the commands – and promptly proceeded to made clear his sense of the meaning and the values defended by those quite inadequately worded laws [‘You have heard it said… but I say to you”].

In today’s passage, Jesus rigorously engaged with the Sadducees who went no further than the literal wording of the Law and could not, would not, capture its sense, the values it was meant to sensitise them to. Still, not wanting just to win the argument but hoping to win them to an immensely richer sense of their God, he was prepared to base his further comment on an incident contained in the Book of Exodus, the second of those five books that the Sadducees accepted, longing to open them to the wonderful sense of life beyond death to be lived with that God.

Exodus has the incident where Moses was confronted by a bush on fire, which burned but was not consumed by the fire. God spoke with Moses from the bush. In their conversation, in answer to a request made by Moses, God identified himself. “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob”. What might have been a meaning beyond the words? Jesus was inviting them to look.

Yahweh, the God of the three Hebrew patriarchs, was not like the gods of the people of the surrounding cultures in their settled towns and cities, with their cultivated fields and herds of livestock. Their main interest was the ongoing fertility of their crops and animals, assured by the regular cycle of the seasons, and the unchanging certainty of the status quo. Their gods were fertility gods.

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were wandering nomads. Their God was not a fertility god, not a God of the status quo. Instead, their God spoke to them of a future, a blessed future, where not only they would be blessed but all the nations of the earth would be blessed through them. Yahweh was a God of hope, a hope in which Abraham, Isaac and Jacob would continue to share. At the burning bush, God did not speak of them as dead men, but as somehow living exemplars of anticipation and hope.

But, to see that, we need to read the story with imagination, as we might read poetry; and from an intimate sense of God – as Jesus did.