Dead Sea. Living Water.

There are some questions that are not really questions at all — they are traps. In today’s Gospel the Sadducees confront Jesus with one of those questions. They do not believe in the resurrection, so they spin out a scenario of a woman married seven times, and then ask, “In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?”

It sounds clever, but it is not an inquiry. It is a test. They are trying to corner Jesus, to shrink the hope of resurrection into an absurdity.

Jesus refuses the trap. He will not let them bind the eternal with the categories of time. Instead, He declares: “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive” (Lk. 20:38).

That conviction is not new. Centuries before, in the story from Maccabees, seven brothers stand before their persecutors, willing to give their lives because they believe God will raise them up. Their words ring with defiance: “The King of the…