This weeks’ Gospel focusses on this world and other world realities. It warns us to be careful of how preoccupied we are with this world realties forgetful of the other world. The resurrection is an other world reality.

There is a cycle of life for us, human beings. In this world, we are conceived in our mothers’ womb. We are born, we live out our child hood with all the issues that are important at that time, then we grow up and become adults.

This is the time for taking wives and husbands and rearing children. We enter with our children into the world of grandchildren and maybe great grandchildren. Then we die.

But that is not the end. There is an other world—the world of angels, resurrection and new life and being sons and daughters of God. But it is a world for which we must be judged worthy of a place.

It is how we live our lives in this world that determines our place in the other world. We are children of the resurrection and in the second cycle of life we are no longer preoccupied with birth, childhood and taking wives and husbands.

But for those who do not believe in the resurrection, the preoccupation never ends as they seek to hold on to immortality through their children and their children’s children.

This is why for the Sadducee the worst thing that could happen would be for a woman to marry seven brothers who remain childless—this would mean that the continuity of the man’s name is lost.

But the woman has no name—no identity when there are no children.
For the whole human race, including the Sadducee, death is certain, so to continue to live on when there is no concept of resurrection, human propagation becomes the focus.

While we live in this world we do have life and death and resurrection experiences that prepare us for the world to come—the other world

The death of my marriage was one of those experiences which forced me to examine my life in this world and to become concerned for my life in the other world.

I saw how misdirected my focus in life had been and so I began to search for God recognising that my relationship with God was the most important pursuit in life--not only in this world but also in the world to come.

My journey to the other world started with my experience of God and his love for me. It was a journey from death to life as I came face to face with the living God and all other relationships paled in the light of that relationship.

My experience also led me to question my belief in the resurrection and the life of the world to come. And the questioning goes on.
Recently I was chatting with a young woman who is facing the break up of her marriage of 10 years.

She had everything going for her—a beautiful three year-old daughter and a loving husband who was her life. She said to me he was someone who was with me constantly, with whom I shared everything—how am I going to find life out of this death?

And I thought of my own journey from this world to the other world.
Thank God that there is resurrection from the dead!

Lord, we thank you for our experiences of life in this world when we take wives and husbands. We thank you for parents, for children, for friendship and all our loving relationships.

Lord, we thank you for those who remind us that life in this world does not end with death and prepare us to be judged worthy of a place in the other world, as children of the resurrection.

We ask for your forgiveness when we forget that there is another world and we become preoccupied with the things of this world, with taking wives and husbands.

We ask your forgiveness for the injustices of this world ---when infant girls are sold in marriage to men and others are used as prostitutes for the sexual pleasure of men. We ask your forgiveness when in this world the concern of men is that at the resurrection to which of them will she be wife?

For these death experiences to innocent women and children we ask your forgiveness, 0 Lord.

We pray that in this month of November when we remember the dead and pray for them, that we who are children of this world will come to a deeper faith in the resurrection and the hope that that gives to us. We pray that we may be judged worthy of a place in the other world and in the resurrection from the dead.

Gospel Meditations for November are by Linda Wyke. An active member of the parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, San Fernando, Linda, a mother and grandmother, is a former Archdiocesan Director of Religious Education.