Published: June 3, 2026
There is a kind of doubt that does not come from honest searching. It comes dressed in logic, wearing the robes of scholarship, and it asks questions not to find truth but to make truth look impossible. That is the kind of doubt Jesus encounters today in the Gospel of Mark, when the Sadducees approach him with their elaborate hypothetical about a woman who outlived seven husbands.
The Sadducees were a powerful religious faction in first-century Judaism. Unlike the Pharisees, they rejected the oral tradition and, crucially, they denied the resurrection of the dead. Their question to Jesus — which of the seven brothers would be the woman's husband in the resurrection? — was not a sincere inquiry. It was a trap. They were attempting to use the logic of earthly life to demonstrate that resurrection must be absurd. If a woman had seven husbands, then resurrection would produce an unresolvable domestic conflict, and therefore resurrection could not be real. Case closed, or so they thought.
Jesus does not step around the challenge. He meets it directly, and he does so with a two-part answer that is at once philosophically precise and spiritually luminous. The first part addresses the nature of resurrection life itself. In the age to come, he tells them, those who are raised neither marry nor are given in marriage. They are like the angels. This is not a statement about romantic love being somehow less valuable in eternity. It is a declaration that the entire framework of earthly human life — including the social institutions that hold it together — will be transformed into something that cannot be fully imagined from within our present condition. The Sadducees were projecting the categories of this world onto the next, and Jesus gently but firmly corrects the error. Resurrection is not simply the resumption of biological existence. It is a new mode of being entirely, one ordered toward perfect union with God.
The second part of his answer is the more stunning one. Jesus reaches back into the very Torah that the Sadducees revered — the books of Moses, which they accepted as authoritative — and draws out a proof they had somehow read past for years. At the burning bush, God revealed himself to Moses as "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." Jesus points out that God did not say "I was their God." He said "I am." Present tense. These three patriarchs had been dead for centuries by the time Moses stood before the burning bush, and yet God speaks of his relationship with them in the living present. The logic is simple and devastating: God is not in relationship with nothingness. God is not the keeper of memories or the curator of corpses. He is the living God, and those who belong to him are, in some real sense, alive to him even now.
This is the heart of the Christian faith about death and resurrection. It is not merely a comforting sentiment that our loved ones "live on in our hearts." It is an ontological claim: because God holds them, they exist. Because God knows them, they are not lost. The resurrection is not a reversal of death — as if God simply presses rewind — but a transformation of the whole person into a new kind of glory, already real in God's sight even before its final manifestation at the end of time.
We celebrate today the Memorial of Saint Charles Lwanga and his companions, the Ugandan Martyrs, and their witness gives this gospel passage a weight that is almost unbearable in its beauty. These young men — pages and servants at the court of Kabaka Mwanga II of Buganda — were killed between 1885 and 1887 for refusing to renounce their Christian faith and for refusing the king's immoral demands. Charles Lwanga, who had himself baptized several of his companions even as they awaited execution, walked to his death with a serenity that shamed his tormentors. When asked on the day of his execution whether he truly expected to see God, he reportedly said yes, with a joy that those present could not explain. He believed, in the most literal possible way, what Jesus taught the Sadducees: that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.
What does this gospel mean for us, living our ordinary lives on an ordinary Wednesday in June? It invites us to examine the small doubts we carry, the places where we have quietly accepted the Sadducees' assumption — that only what is measurable and present and earthly is real. We live in a culture that is sophisticated in its skepticism. Questions about eternal life are often treated as wishful thinking, the emotional consolations of people who cannot face finality. But Jesus is not offering consolation prizes. He is making a claim about reality: that the God who called the universe into being is personally in relationship with every human soul he has made, and that relationship does not end at death.
This should change how we approach grief. When we mourn someone we have loved, we can mourn honestly — grief is real, and the Church does not ask us to pretend otherwise — but we mourn with a hope that is not vague. The person we loved is known to God, held by God, and in some mode we cannot yet fully understand, alive in God. Charles Lwanga knew this. The Ugandan martyrs knew this. It is why they could sing as they died.
It should also change how we think about our own lives. If God is the God of the living, then our lives are not just passing through a meaningless interval before oblivion. Every act of faith, every act of love, every prayer offered in the early morning or the late night, every choice to do what is right when it is difficult — all of it is seen and known by the God who lives, and all of it will be, in his good time, gathered up into something that does not end.
Jesus closed his reply to the Sadducees with a rare note of sharpness: "You are greatly misled." They had the Scriptures in their hands and had managed to miss the most important thing the Scriptures were saying. May we not make the same mistake. May we read the Word of God with open eyes, willing to be surprised by what it contains, willing to let it overturn the assumptions we bring to it. And may we, like the martyrs of Uganda, carry into our daily lives the quiet, unshakeable conviction that God is here, God is alive, and all who belong to him are never truly lost.
Gospel: Mark 12:18-27 | Memorial of Saint Charles Lwanga and Companions, Martyrs