OMELIE / Omelie EN

09 nov 2025

09/11/2025 - 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

09/11/2025 - 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

First reading 2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14 Psalm 16 Second reading 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5 Gospel Luke 20:27-38

The central theme of today's readings is faith in the resurrection. We believe that God is God, that nothing can be above him, not even death. God does not create man to die, but to live. And all men created by him live for him.

This is how Jesus concludes his speech in response to the Sadducees, who had tried to trip him up on this subject. They, the rich people of Jerusalem, who stubbornly believed that only the first five books of the Scriptures, the Pentateuch, were the Word of God, were in agreement with our contemporaries. What do they say? They say, “We no longer see the dead, so with death everything ends”.

This is the typical reasoning of the rich (and those who would like to be rich), who must justify their greed and avarice, their blindness aimed at not noticing the poor, their blatant daily injustices. “Since everything ends with death, let us live as well as we can today”. And on their lips, the word “better” encompasses the many forms of selfishness used to produce enjoyment and pleasure. These were the Sadducees, these are our friends, young and old, and these are often us, who consider ourselves believers but live as if God did not exist and death were the worst misfortune, that is, the annulment of our lives.

Jesus speaks of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who lived many centuries before him, and he speaks of them as living persons, and he speaks of them in this way because the Scriptures themselves speak in this way. God saved his people for the sake of these ancestors; he made vows to them that still endure and will endure forever. If Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were no longer there, God's oaths would have no value.

How can we think that our life ends with death? Is God not capable of overcoming death? Is he too a slave to it? If so, our true god would be death, and the fear of death our leader.

He who uses death as a wage wants to become our master, and he succeeds if we worship death as the ultimate reality. This is the enemy of God, the Adversary, who uses fear, the fear of death, to coerce us and make us obey him. But we, who are sure that we will live forever because our lives are in God's hands, will not be frightened.

We are, and will be, like the seven sons of the faithful and courageous woman who succeeded in passing on to them the fear of God. In the first reading, we hear that those sons, confident that life is willed and loved by him, were not afraid of death or its sufferings. They allowed themselves to be killed rather than abandon the God of life.

We live in the school of Jesus; indeed, we live with him. He is always persecuted in the world, and we live with him. He is rejected by those who consider themselves intelligent, and we live with him. He is mocked by those in power, and we live with him. He is ignored by those who make decisions, and we live with him. He is silenced by those who write and those who speak in front of everyone, and we live with him. We live with him because we know that we will live with him, and no threat and no injustice can take away the life that God has planned to give us after this one is over.

Perhaps it is not entirely true that we are always united with Jesus in all these situations, but this is our desire and our prayer.

We pray to our Father for perseverance, and the Father will give it to us, because he himself desires and wants us to be united with his Son, the true and eternal Life that flows from his heart, the source of Life! Life, which is the Son of God, is a life still unknown even to the angels, and we will inherit it. This life will be our greatest joy, precisely when we see that even the people we now love will be clothed in it!