A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Mark. Some then some sadducees who hold that there is no resurrection came to Jesus with this question. Teacher, we were left this in writing by Moses. If anyone's brother dies leaving a wife but no child, his brother must take the wife and produce offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers.
The elders took a wife and died, leaving no children. The second brother took the woman, and he too died childless. The same thing happened to the third. In fact, none of the seven brothers left any children behind. Last of all, the woman also died.
Now at the resurrection, when they all come remember, the Sadducees are against the resurrection. So now they say to our lord, now at the resurrection, when all these brothers come back to life, whose wife will she be? All seven married her. Jesus replied, you are badly misled because you fail to understand the scriptures or the power of God. When people rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but live like angels in heaven.
As to the raising of the dead, have you not read in the book of Moses in the passage about the burning bush how God said to Moses, I am the God of Abraham, the god of Isaac, and the god of Jacob. He is the god of the living, not of the dead. You are very much mistaken, and this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. We too are very much mistaken if we translate the spiritual life exclusively and literally in terms of the physical life, of the material life, of the life we know in this world.
We are very much mistaken. It's called anthropomorphism. That's the general word to cover it. Another anthropomorphism simply means to make like man, to make human. Now this is a this is a constant problem because we begin with a fact, we are human.
I mean, give yourself the benefit of the doubt if you're in doubt. We are human beings. We are not angels. We are not brute beasts. We are human beings.
We are a frightful, we are an awesome complexity, a mixture of all that is beneath man in the animal world, and yet we participate in so much that's above us in the spiritual world. And all of this is put together in the unity of the person, and I stress unity. We are not two things. We are not body and soul. That's the ham sandwich attitude concept.
That's Descartes and Plato. That is no proper concept of the human being. And our holy father, the present holy father, way long before he ever became even a bishop, when he was nothing but a very humble professor in a Polish university. This was his theme about the unity of the person. And it's amazing how that concept, if you've read his material, it's not easy reading.
Remember he was Polish and he wrote in Polish and was translated into English. It doesn't get any simpler. But some things come out very clearly, and one of them is his concept of the human being as a unity of extreme complexity, of extreme complexity. Now let us go back to Newman where Newman says, what what attracts human beings? Well, what should attract it?
The world. What falls under our senses? Saint Thomas Aquinas says, we know nothing except what has been fed in through the senses. That has to be very carefully analyzed. So here we are.
We are in contact with a material, physical, secular world, and that's what we know best, and that's what attracts us most. I ask you to recall the the journey of the chosen people from Egypt to the so called promised land, forty years in the desert, and how they blew hot and how they blew cold. How one minute they were all for their god, their one only god, and you scarcely turn the page when they're off worshiping idols and indulging even in human sacrifice. Now my point is this, you see, the the Jewish people were very concrete minded. They were not theoreticians.
The Bible, and especially the Old Testament, is not a book of philosophy. It doesn't deal in universals. It deals in concrete, concrete situations. And dealing in concrete situations, dealing with life as a human being deals with it, and as only a human being can deal with it within the limitations of our humanity, what do we come up with? We come up with concepts which have all the characteristics.
They are all stamped with the mark of being human, of being of this world. When you step out of that and you go into the supernatural, when you go into the abstract, when you form a concept we have no sensation of a concept. We have no sensual perception of a concept. So much so that there are those who deny that they even exist. You are in a totally different world.
Now the great struggle, to bring this back again to the subject of this reading this morning from our from Saint Mark and the words of our blessed Lord. You see, it is so easy to make God after our own image. And let me repeat, it's almost impossible not to do it, not to do it. We can only think as human beings. And as we think in terms of human beings, we're bound to think in terms of space and time and material things.
How can we not do it? And that god is none of that. None of it. Not at all. There is no space to god.
There is no time to god. There are no parts to God. There there is nothing physical about God. There is no coming. There is no becoming.
There is no passing. There is no future. There is no past. None of these none of these concepts have any meaning if you apply them to God almighty. Not a single one of them.
Now think of that. And yet you cannot divorce your thinking from those concepts. You can't do it. Just take the little verb to be, I S, when you say God is. You cannot say that univocally.
That is using verb to be univocally in the same sense as we use it in our everyday life and apply it to God. Think of that for a minute. Not even the little verb to be, God is. You cannot even apply it to God. Because you see, the concept of isness involves to a certain extent time, and there's no time in God.
It involves, in a sense, of becoming. There is no becoming in God. Everything we know becomes and changes. There is no change in God. So you so that even that tiny little word to be, you cannot use univocally of God without getting into anthropomorphism, without making God like to yourself.
And that's what the great mistake you see of the these hearers of our Lord, was they're trying to argue against resurrection, trying to reduce the idea of resurrection to an absurdity. That's what they're trying to do. And our blessed lord says, look, friends, you've got it completely wrong. You are thinking of of eternity. You are thinking of immortality in human terms.
You cannot do it because you're going to be somewhat like an angel where there is neither marriage nor other human things. You see, true religion is not an easy thing to work on. It as as I've said in many instances, what we call religion is an enemy of religion because we can lose religion in religious practices. Because religious practices need not be religious at all. Not at all.
It's not an easy thing to try to keep a decent proper proper concept of God, of immortality, of the spiritual. These are not easy things to come by. They are not. We're we are asking ourselves to do something which is almost beyond almost beyond our power. And yet god asked us to do it.
Our blessed lord asked us to do it. He says, be not of this world. My kingdom is not of this world. Here we have this passage today. You're gravely mistaken if you think that the hereafter is going to be like the present.
You are grossly mistaken. Our blessed lord says it. So we must try to make the effort to to to think of God as God and not as man. Now remember, everything I've said about God is about God, not about Jesus Christ, because there you're dealing with a human being, with a true human nature, but God all the same. See, when you talk about our blessed Lord, you're in a different ballpark entirely.
Because as we say in that opening prayer, son of God, son of Mary, he had a true human nature. Nature. But the concept of God himself is what I was stressing this morning. And it's it's a struggle, but it's an important struggle that we try to have a purified concept of God. In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit.
Amen.