32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Cycle C)
During the month of November, the Church encourages us to pray for the faithful departed with the hope not only of meeting them in heaven, but with the hope of the Resurrection of the dead, as we say every Sunday in the Creed.
It is fitting, then, that we are presented with this gospel passage as the liturgical year winds down to a close. The Sadducees question is absurd, and leads us to think that 1) they are trying to trick Jesus, and 2) they neither believe in nor understand the Resurrection. But… do we understand? Perhaps we are tempted, as they were, to see the Resurrection as a prolongation of this life, just better, with no sickness or death. But from Jesus’ reply we gather that it’s not that at all. And this is hard for us to understand, used as we are to our present reality. Yet, it should increase our hope, for our God “is not God of the dead but of the living, for to him all are alive” (Lk 20:38). Even those who have preceded us in death are alive to him—and to us, in the Communion of the Saints.
Let us ask the Lord to increase our hope and to “direct our hearts to the love of God” as St. Paul says in the second reading (2 Thess 2:35), that we may at the Resurrection be counted among those alive in him. God bless you.
Fr. Luis R. Largaespada
A BIT OF HISTORY. No one knows exactly when 40 Hours Devotion actually began. However, historical consensus supports its origin in the 16th century in Milan, Italy. St. Anthony Zaccaria, St. Philip Neri and St. Ignatius of Loyola are credited with promoting 40 Hours Devotion there in 1530. In 1539, Pope Paul III was asked to and did approve an indulgence (a partial or total remission of the temporal punishment for sins) for those individuals who participated in the Devotion. By 1550, St. Philip Neri and St. Ignatius Loyola were instituting 40 Hours Devotion in Rome.
