Reflection on This Week’s Readings

BEYOND THE IMAGINATION

In the late 1990s at a one-hundredth birthday party, someone asked the guest of honor, “What is the most remarkable invention you have seen in your lifetime?” to which the new centenarian replied, “The ballpoint pen.” Those gathered found it hard to imagine a time without the ballpoint pen. The current age—whenever it happens—is defined by things that are so much a part of life that we cannot imagine how the world ever existed (or ever will exist) without them. Whether we are talking about ballpoint pens or legal bonds between spouses, we think, “That’s just how things work.”

In our gospel today, some Sadducees come to Jesus with a question. Their intent is to embarrass the teacher and to demonstrate how ridiculous the notion of resurrection is. Who could imagine such a thing? The scene they paint features would-be husbands lining up and waiting, like contestants on The Bachelorette, to see “Whose wife will she be?”

Jesus answers the question by speaking about a whole new age: the reign of God. When this new age is present in its fullness, those who have died will be alive, and they will be identified by their status not as a spouse, but as a son or a daughter. “They . . . are children of God,” Jesus says, and “children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:36).

While we do not yet experience the new age in its fullness, it has indeed broken into our history and our lives: Christ is risen! In holy baptism Christ shares his risen life with us so that in our own time, “this age” and “the age to come” overlap. Christ’s reign brings about a new world beyond our imagining: we, too, are children of God and children of the resurrection.