The Gospel passage for this weekend is the trick question the Sadducees (who do not believe in an afterlife) put to Jesus about the woman who was married seven times and to whom would she be married to at the resurrection of the dead? This was a trick question with no real interest in the truth. They wanted to trap Jesus.

The response given by Jesus is rather complex. Jesus affirms a resurrection and an afterlife is different from life NOW in various aspects. He speaks of “The children of THIS AGE,” this is our earthly, physical, reproductive sexual life and then he speaks of “THAT AGE OF THE RESURRECTION,” where reproductive life is not necessity, where people are no longer subject to death. That is why Jesus says “That God is the God not of the dead but of the Living.”

This implies that we have already begun the enteral-life journey. Every moment we have lived and every moment we will live, in the ‘NOW’draws us ever closer – in one mortal moment as it were – into an afterlife, in the eternal intimacy with the Trinity.

None of us can fully grasp the meaning nor the dimensions of what “Eternal life” is or means. We have to accept in faith that Jesus affirms a resurrection from the dead in the pattern of his own and an afterlife in the eternal intimacy with the Trinity.

How we live, what we do with the gift of life and the attributes that we have been endowed with by God, how they have served to build the Kingdom here on earth, will set-up the dimensions for that eternal intimacy with the Trinity.

Not wanting to be pedantic (actually I am!) takes us to Question 13: “Why did God create me?” We should know the answer by now!