Saturday, 20 November 2010
Saturday of the Thirty-third week in Ordinary Time

St. Edmund the Martyr (841-870)



Commentary of the day
Vatican Council II : "He is not God of the dead, but of the living"

Reading

Revel. 11:4-12.
These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the
Lord of the earth.
If anyone wants to harm them, fire comes out of their mouths and devours
their enemies. In this way, anyone wanting to harm them is sure to be
slain.
They have the power to close up the sky so that no rain can fall during the
time of their prophesying. They also have power to turn water into blood
and to afflict the earth with any plague as often as they wish.
When they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the
abyss will wage war against them and conquer them and kill them.
Their corpses will lie in the main street of the great city, which has the
symbolic names "Sodom" and "Egypt," where indeed their Lord was crucified.
Those from every people, tribe, tongue, and nation will gaze on their
corpses for three and a half days, and they will not allow their corpses to
be buried.
The inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and be glad and exchange
gifts because these two prophets tormented the inhabitants of the earth.
But after the three and a half days, a breath of life from God entered
them. When they stood on their feet, great fear fell on those who saw them.

Then they heard a loud voice from heaven say to them, "Come up here." So
they went up to heaven in a cloud as their enemies looked on.


Lk 20:27-40.
Some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, came forward
and put this question to him,
saying, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us, 'If someone's brother dies leaving a
wife but no child, his brother must take the wife and raise up descendants
for his brother.'
Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman but died
childless.
Then the second
and the third married her, and likewise all the seven died childless.
Finally the woman also died.
Now at the resurrection whose wife will that woman be? For all seven had
been married to her."
Jesus said to them, "The children of this age marry and remarry;
but 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.
That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the
bush, when he called '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."
Some of the scribes said in reply, "Teacher, you have answered well."
And they no longer dared to ask him anything.


Copyright © Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, USCCB



Commentary of the day

Vatican Council II
Constitution on the Church in the modern world « Gaudium et spes », § 18 (©Libreria Vaticana editrice)

"He is not God of the dead, but of the living"

It is in the face of death that the riddle a human existence grows most
acute. Not only is man tormented by pain and by the advancing deterioration
of his body, but even more so by a dread of perpetual extinction. He
rightly follows the intuition of his heart when he abhors and repudiates
the utter ruin and total disappearance of his own person. He rebels against
death because he bears in himself an eternal seed which cannot be reduced
to sheer matter. All the endeavors of technology, though useful in the
extreme, cannot calm his anxiety; for prolongation of biological life is
unable to satisfy that desire for higher life which is inescapably lodged
in his breast.Although the mystery of death utterly beggars the
imagination, the Church has been taught by divine revelation and firmly
teaches that man has been created by God for a blissful purpose beyond the
reach of earthly misery. In addition, that bodily death from which man
would have been immune had he not sinned will be vanquished, according to
the Christian faith, when man who was ruined by his own doing is restored
to wholeness by an almighty and merciful Saviour. For God has called man
and still calls him so that with his entire being he might be joined to Him
in an endless sharing of a divine life beyond all corruption. Christ won
this victory when He rose to life, for by His death He freed man from
death. Hence to every thoughtful man a solidly established faith provides
the answer to his anxiety about what the future holds for him. At the same
time faith gives him the power to be united in Christ with his loved ones
who have already been snatched away by death; faith arouses the hope that
they have found true life with God.