Photo from Wittman.
“All are alive to God,” Jesus says in the final words of Sunday’s gospel. Jesus is arguing a hot topic of his time—resurrection of the dead. He argues that when God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, a story from the book of Exodus, God says, “I am the God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” This shows these ancestors are alive to God.
If Jesus were debating hot issues today, he could argue from the same book of the bible against capital punishment. The book of Exodus contains the ten commandments. In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus tells his followers not only to keep the fifth commandment, “Thou shall not kill,” but to deal with their anger toward their brothers and sisters (Matthew 5.21-24).
If he were debating hot issues today, Jesus might also talk about abortion and euthanasia, which like capital punishment are also life issues. The Catholic Church teaches respect for the life of the fetus from its beginning because it is a human being from the moment of conception. Ending a life is morally wrong.
In arguing for the right to life of a fetus, many people pit the life of the unborn against the rights of women to make choices about their lives and bodies. The Church is well-known for being pro-life, teaching the sacredness of the human fetus. The Church is also pro-woman, teaching that women are full human persons capable of thinking, choosing, and loving.
Most women value life and want to carry a child to birth. Women for whom poverty and violence threaten their capacity to carry and raise a child need support.
In his encyclical The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II says that God, in giving life, demands that each person love, respect, and promote life. Human life comes from God. Only God can end a human life. The human person is sacred. The Catholic Church teaches that when one is terminally ill, one does not need to choose extraordinary means to stay alive, but technology raises questions. When is a person really dead? When is it right to stop a respirator or feeding tube?
The Catholic Church teaches that the duty to love one’s neighbor as one’s self gives one the right to self defense; we have no obligation to love our neighbor more than ourselves. It also gives people in legitimate authority the right to render an aggressor unable to inflict harm and insure people’s safety and the order of society.
You shall not kill. Human life is sacred, involving God’s creative action from the beginning and God’s purposes to the end.
Catechism of the Catholic Church #2258, 2270-71, www.usccb.org paragraphs 2258, 2270-71
The bible contains two testaments.
Christians call Israel’s holy writings the Old Testament and refer to their own sacred writings as the New Testament. Both testaments give witness to God’s loving actions in our human history. The Old Testament remembers all God did for the people of Israel; the New Testament remembers Jesus, his death and resurrection and the birth of Christian communities.
Sunday’s gospel is a passage from the New Testament that makes more sense the more one knows about Israel’s scriptures. 1. Who are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and when did they live? 2. Who is Moses and when did he live? 3. Why does a brother have to marry a dead brother’s wife?
Answers: 1. Genesis, chapters 12-50. 2000-1500 B.C. 2. Moses led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt about 1250 B.C. 3. See the levirate law, Deuteronomy 25.5-10.
Israel and its religious traditions almost vanished from memory. Always a small nation, Israel lay in the path of the superpowers of the ancient Middle East. In 721 B.C. Assyrian armies (from the region that is Iraq today) destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, home to ten Israelite tribes. In 587 B.C. Babylonian armies (from the region that is Iran today) destroyed the southern kingdom of Judah, home to two Israelite tribes. Jerusalem, its walls and temple, lay in ruins. The Babylonians marched most able-bodied Israelites into exile in Babylon, an exile that lasted 50 years.
To preserve Israel’s religious identity, priests in exile became holy scrapbookers. They collected Israel’s religious traditions in what grew into the First Testament. Slowly Israel became people of the book.
The priests braided together four strands of tradition—Y, E, D, P. The Yahwist tradition (Y) comes from among the southern tribes of Judah. The Elohist tradition (E) comes from among the northern tribes.
The Yahwist tradition refers to God as Yahweh (Lord in English, see Genesis 2-3). Jews never speak God’s name aloud but say Adonai (Lord) instead. The Elohist tradition refers to God as Elohim (God in English, see Genesis 17). Sometimes the bible tells two versions of the same story because the priests saved both traditions.
The Y and E strands tell the sagas of Israel’s earliest ancestors, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah and Rachel. Israel’s 12 tribes descend from them. Y and E also tell the story of Moses leading the Hebrew slaves’ escape from Egypt and making a covenant with God, then settling in Canaan. These are the books of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, and Leviticus.
The scrapbookers already had the book called Deuteronomy (D). In 622 B.C., three decades before the exile began, the high priest Hilkiah found this scroll in the temple. Deuter means second. Deuteronomy is a second telling of Israel’s escape from Egypt and making a covenant with God. King Josiah had used this book to urge a reform—to worship no other gods but Yahweh alone.
The writer of Deuteronomy also preserved the records of the kings who ruled after David united the 12 tribes into a kingdom. The books 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings contain these annals.
The priestly collectors create the fourth strand of tradition themselves (P). They place the story of God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh at the beginning of the testament (Genesis 1). The priests collect many laws and directions for worship.
Besides history and law, the Old Testament includes the writing of 16 of Israel’s prophets, 150 prayers called psalms, and a book of proverbs. From the late centuries before Christ, the First Testament also includes in its library several collections of wisdom, books full of sayings and proverbs used to educate young people in awe and reverence for God.
The Old Testament prepares for the New and the New Testament fulfills the Old; the two shed light on each other; both are true Word of God.
Catechism of the Catholic Church #140