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Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.
It is quite important to make sure that we understand what the terms of the bible mean. The Church can help with this.
Understanding Terms
We have to be careful when we hear in the readings “the Jews” because it makes it appear that they are all the same. But that’s not true. And we see profound evidence of that in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles. There are Sadducees and Pharisees.
The Sadducees did not believe in spiritual beings, shall we say. They did not believe in life after death. They simply believed that you lived according to the law of God during your life. In many respects, I think it’s also the case that they didn’t believe in any of the scriptures being inspired except for the Torah or the first five books of the Bible.
The Pharisees believed in all of these things. They accepted the Bible as inspired and all of the books that we would now believe to be part of the Old Testament. They believed in spirits and angels and they believed in the resurrection of the dead. They were also more likely to be zealous about maintaining the absolute need to follow the law of God, that it was in following the law of God that the world would be made ready for the coming of the long-promised Messiah.
Paul plays on these differences. Paul says he’s a Pharisee and his life indicates that he would have all the characteristics and qualities of a Pharisee. But by mentioning that he’s a Pharisee and by stating that he’s on trial for the resurrection of the dead, he immediately plays into the division between Sadducees and Pharisees. And we see that it gets quite heated because they both believed that they were absolutely right.
We would side today more especially with the Pharisees, that there’s a spiritual realm, there are angels, for example, and that there is the resurrection of the dead because where Jesus has gone, we hope to follow. It reminds us, though, that we need to be careful to make generalizations about any group. That just as it is challenging and wrong to say that when we hear the Jews in the Bible, especially in the Gospels and especially in John’s Gospel, we have to be recognizing that there were many different kinds of Jews.
The same is true still today, although not over the divisions like the Sadducees and the Pharisees, but there are Hasidic Jews, there are Orthodox Jews, there are Reformed Jews, there are conservative Jews, and there are those Jews who, like Catholics, many Catholics, would kind of assume this is a cultural thing, but not necessarily something that guides their life. Let us ask the Lord today that we might be able to seek him who loves us more than we can know, that we might ask the Lord Jesus to come deeply into our hearts and into our soul so that we might come to know Jesus, who is the way, the truth, and the life.
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