32nd Sunday in Ordinary time, Luke 20:27-38
Have you ever met someone way too clever to have a faith? Bit of an oxymoron that, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes; conversed with the clever, pathetically responding by muttering only “well it’s faith, you’re not supposed to understand it all, but it IS the only rational answer”.
The Sadducees ran the temple, they were the aristocrats of the day, well known it seems for their wealth and corruption. They had no tolerance for anything remotely supernatural, the soul they believed died along with the body. They had faith in only what they could see with their own eyes and yet followed a puritanical religious observance, they liked a purity in their liturgy that didn’t reflect in their lives. Jesus was always going to be a problem for that.
I have a favourite verse from Romans at the moment “the more they became philosophers the more stupid they became, exchanging the glory of the immortal God for worthless imitations”. It seems when we think we have all the answers we have no need of God. Maybe this is where the Sadducees were or maybe they were secretly afraid. Yes, they would have feared the threat to all their money-laundering and their reputations, but fundamentally there must have been a deep seated fear that this is all there is.
I’ve tried hard to imagine what that must be like, how hard it must be live with no hope of a purpose or a final destination. It’s bleak. I think it leads to despair, to a grasping for all the material wealth you can, and to creating your own god to replace the sense of security that the rest of us enjoy.
It’s easy to hiss and boo at the Sadducee baddies, but Jesus offers them a way out of their darkness, he offers a hand of truth. A mind-blowing hand of truth, speaking right into where they are most deceived, where they most need His light. It may have looked like a snappy put-down from where they were, but truth resonates in our core whether we like it or not.
The biggest problem is just how much we love the familiarity of darkness, and how fearful we are as broken creatures to grasp the hand of light.
On this Remembrance Sunday let’s give thanks that all our fallen don’t continue to exist just in our memories, but truly do continue to live under their Father’s gaze in Heaven.
