Wednesday in the Ninth Week of Ordinary Time, June 2, 2021

Mark 12:18-27

Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus 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 and died, leaving no descendants. So the second brother married her and died, leaving no descendants, and the third likewise. And the seven left no descendants. Last of all the woman also died. At the resurrection when they arise whose wife will she be? For all seven had been married to her.” Jesus said to them, “Are you not misled because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but they are like the angels in heaven. As for the dead being raised, have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God told him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead but of the living. You are greatly misled.”

At the time of the events in this reading taken from the Gospel of St. Mark, the Lord Jesus is walking in the Temple courtyards during Holy Week.  He has been accosted by the Jewish leaders, by the Pharisees, and by the Herodians.  Here, the wealthy Sadducees confront him about the doctrine of the Resurrection, evidently taking him for a leading Pharisee.  The Lord quickly dismisses their contention, and demands, “Are you not misled because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?”  And then at the end of his speaking with the Sadducees he says to them, “You are greatly misled.”  The Greek word translated here as “misled” means to be “led astray” or to be “deceived”.  The sense is stronger than merely, you are “misled”.  Now, this verb is in the present passive tense, and in the Greek this signifies that a contours action is being performed on someone or something: “You are being led astray”, “You are being deceived”.  That is, the Sadducees are not deceived one time on this one matter, but it is an ongoing deception.  And “You are being deceived” begs the question, By whom, or, By what?  The implication is, “You are being deceived by someone.”  They are, in fact, deceived by the enemy of the Resurrection, the devil.  The devil does not come right out and announce himself and then teach that there is no resurrection of the dead.  He “deceives” people into holding this position through all sorts of subterfuge and sophistry.  For the Sadducees, the first step for the devil was in subtly persuading them in their reasoning that the books of the Prophets, which contain the first revelations of the doctrine, were not Sacred Scripture.  Next, since their early rivals the Pharisees openly taught that the dead would rise again to judgment, the Sadducees dug in and taught against it.  As they did so, they developed sophistic (one might say, pre-Jesuitical) arguments to show that it could not be.  Mostly, however, they only convinced themselves, for they were existed only within their small circle in Jerusalem.

“You are being deceived.”  There are very many people and movements that have deception as their primary goal.  With the advances in communications, the deceivers are seemingly everywhere, and they even camouflage themselves as “experts”, “fact-checkers”, “authorities”, and “sources”.  They exist in every sphere of public and private life.  We Catholics have a great advantage over others by having the Holy Scriptures and Tradition to guide us.  We can look for ourselves and see that they have told us the same truth for thousands of years.  We can go to the great libraries and museums and read ancient pieces of scroll containing the words of the Apostles and Prophets on them, or check the records of our history in the works of the Fathers and the Doctors of the Church.  Even if priests, bishops, and popes lie to us, the words we need to know are easy to find.  So let us go about our business undisturbed, and maintain our faith, awaiting the great day of the Lord, for when he comes and the sea gives up its dead, all things will be reviewed, and those who preached and taught lies will be exposed to the light and shrivel.