GOD OF THE LIVING, NOT OF THE DEAD


ST. BONIFACE, BISHOP, MARTYR  

Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP

2 Tim 1:1-3,6-12; Ps 123:1-2; Mk 12:18-27

God of the Living, not of the Dead

Our Lord’s interaction with the Sadducees reveals something interesting for our consideration. As we reflected yesterday, human life is short and dark because we mostly live by the senses. Thus, those who make the senses the principle of their living and doing have no spiritual life. The profession of faith in Jesus Christ gives us a new principle of living. By believing in the word of God and building our lives on the word of God, we come to the eternal light. This light is Jesus Christ himself, the Eternal Word of God. The word of God gives us both new life and true light to understand reality. The Sadducees lack these because of their unbelief. Based on these twofold deficiencies of the Sadducees, they made erroneous deductions from the instruction of Moses. “Is not the reason why you go wrong, that you understand neither the scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, men and women do not marry; no, they are like the angels in heaven.” Faith helps us to escape the darkness of error and materialism.

The Sadducees were interpreting the instructions of Moses from their dead and dark worldview. They are spiritually dead because they do not believe in spirits and life after death. They were among the people who live without faith in God or in the word of God that offers us spiritual light to understand superphysical reality. Without faith in the word of God, one can never understand the nature of life after death; such a one sees nothing and understands nothing spiritually. Without faith, therefore, we cannot enter into the eternal life started here on earth by faith in God. The new spiritual life started here by faith is nothing like the earthly life, for we cannot understand it with earthly or physical parameters. The life we have initiated here on earth by believing in Jesus Christ is like that of angels in heaven who live by the light of God. That there is a life of resurrection different from the life on earth, our Lord confirmed when he said: “Now about the dead rising again, have you never read in the Book of Moses, in the passage about the Bush, how God spoke to him and said: I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob? He is God, not of the dead, but of the living.” God is God of living and not of the dead.

This confirms that the faith we profess in God makes us alive spiritually and relates us directly to God in a way that those without faith do not. Our understanding of this difference motivates our proclamation of the Gospel message to every man so that everyone may turn away from life that leads to death to life that leads to God. This life that comes with faith is the Spirit St. Paul referred to as a gift from God. “God’s gift was not a spirit of timidity, but the Spirit of power, and love, and self-control.” The Spirit comes with the power to free us from the shackles of darkness and death, with love for God and our fellow men, and strength to overcome the unruly self and bring it under the principles of heavenly life. It is the Spirit of Jesus Christ who destroyed death and darkness by his divine power that confers this new life. “He abolished death, and he has proclaimed life and immortality through the Good News.” It is this same Good News we are to proclaim by our lives. This is the mission that St. Boniface committed his whole life once he came to know the truth of the Gospel. He desired to preach it in foreign lands. When Pope Gregory II gave him that mandate, he changed his name from Wynfrith to Boniface and left England for the heathen Germanic tribes, where he preached with so much success. He was made the bishop of the diocese established through his apostolic work. He was murdered on his new mission to Holland, then known as Friesland.     

Let us pray: Grant, merciful God, that the prayers of St. Boniface may help us to firmly hold the faith he taught with his lips and sealed in his blood, that we may confidently profess it by our deeds. 

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