Message of Abbot Paul - Sunday 6th November 2022

It’s said that where there’s a will there’s a way, but as COP27 opens in Cairo, in the land of the Pharaohs, we are forced to ask whether there is really a will among the nations of the world and their leaders to bring global warming under control and so avert the catastrophic end of the planet which is our common home. It’s tragic to think that some couldn’t care less and are willing to put the lives of our children and grandchildren in jeopardy in order still to make a fast buck today. Climate change and the environment are topics far too important just to sweep under the carpet and ignore, as we did for so long. Sadly and shamefully, we continue to destroy the world which is God’s gift not only to us humans but to all those who have no other home but this.

 

​Our Gospel passage from Luke, (Lk 20: 27-38) sees Jesus talking not with Pharisees, as he usually does, but with Sadducees. As Luke reminds us, Sadducees are “those who say that there is no resurrection.” Yet, like the Pharisees, they try to catch Jesus out by asking him an interesting but rather pointless question. “Master, we have it from Moses in writing, that if a man’s married brother dies childless, the man must marry the widow to raise up children for his brother. Well then, there were seven brothers. The first, having married a wife, died childless. The second and then the third married the widow. And the same with all seven, they died leaving no children. Finally, the woman herself died. Now, at the resurrection, to which of them will she be wife since she had been married to all seven?” Now, you would think from the question that’s it’s about the custom they describe of a widow marrying her dead husband’s brother in order to bear children with the same family name, but no, it’s really a catch question on the resurrection and what relationship resurrected people have with each other as compared with this life. Jesus, however, can see where this discussion is going and so cuts it short by stating that marriage and family life are for this world only as in heaven everyone is focussed on God and that we all find fulfilment in God alone.

 

Jesus replies, “The children of this world take wives and husbands, but those who are judged worthy of a place in the other world and in the resurrection from the dead do not marry because they can no longer die, for they are the same as the angels, and, being children of the resurrection, they are sons of God. And Moses himself implies that the dead rise again, in the passage about the bush where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is God, not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all men are in fact alive.” Even now in this life we are the children of the God who lives, sons and daughters of God, and we come to know God through one another. But in the life to come, when God shall be all in all, we will come to know one another and love one another in God. We will all live in God’s love. Faith and hope will no longer be needed and will fade from our lives, but love is eternal and will grow and mature and become more beautiful and fully satisfying. We will no longer long for God for we shall see him face to face and come to love him as he loves us.