32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – Sunday 6th November 2016

In this Sunday’s Gospel Our Blessed Lord finds himself in a similar position that we so often find ourselves in. He is being questioned about his beliefs. In this passage from St. Luke’s Gospel he is being made to defend his belief in eternal life. We can learn from Jesus how to respond when we find ourselves questioned about our faith.

First of all he listens with respect to what is being said. But he doesn’t respond to the agenda set before him. He reminds the Sadducees that they are looking at things from a very secular position. They are comparing the life of faith with the life of everyday realities and this is an invalid comparison.

Someone who has faith is looking at the world from a very different angle. As Pope Francis reminds us in his encyclical on faith: “faith is born of an encounter with the living God who calls us and reveals his love, a love which precedes us and upon which we can lean for security and for the building of our lives. Transformed by this love, we gain fresh vision, new eyes to see… faith does not merely gaze at Jesus, but sees things as Jesus himself sees them, with his own eyes: it is a participation in his way of seeing.”

Just as Jesus in the Gospel passage asks the Sadducees to look at it from a new perspective we have to remind those who disagree with us that we are coming at the problem from a living relationship with Jesus, and invite them to share in this relationship with Christ. Often moments of tension and questioning can be an opportunity to share your faith in Jesus and what it means to you.

As Jesus invites his hearers to see God as a living God so we are called to witness to our faith in a God we know as living and not as a problem or an archaic theory. Only a living faith converts.