Wednesday of the ninth week in Ordinary Time, and the Church honours Saint Charles Lwanga and his companions, the young men of the Ugandan court who went to the fire singing. The Gospel meets a riddle designed to make resurrection look absurd — and Jesus answers it with the God who is not of the dead.
"And the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, approached him. And they questioned him, saying: 'Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if any man's brother will have died and left behind a wife, and not have left behind sons, his brother should take his wife to himself and raise up offspring for his brother. So then, there were seven brothers...' Jesus responded to them: 'But have you not strayed, by not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God? For when they will be resurrected from the dead, they shall neither be married nor give in marriage, but they are like the Angels in heaven. But concerning the dead that they rise again, have you not read in the book of Moses, how God spoke to him from the bush, saying: I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. Therefore, you have strayed greatly.'" (Mk 12:18-27)
The Sadducees do not really want an answer; they want to win. Their elaborate story of one widow and seven brothers is built to make the resurrection collapse into farce. Jesus does not play their game on its level. He tells them they have strayed on two counts at once: they do not know the Scriptures, and they do not know the power of God. The two failures are really one. A small God, imagined as merely the prolongation of our present arrangements, cannot raise anyone; and Scripture read without that power becomes a museum of dead names.
Then Jesus reaches for the most familiar text in their tradition and makes it blaze. At the burning bush, God names himself: "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." Centuries after those three men were buried, God still says I am — not I was — their God. And, Jesus presses, "he is not the God of the dead, but of the living." If God still calls himself their God, then in some way that outruns the grave, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob still live to him. The resurrection is not first a doctrine about the future; it is the consequence of who God is. A living God does not hold dead friends.
This is why the Ugandan martyrs belong to this Gospel so exactly. Charles Lwanga and his companions were not aged sages; many were teenagers, pages of the royal household, recent converts whose faith was only a few seasons old. Asked to renounce the God who claimed them, they refused, and were marched to Namugongo and burned. By every Sadducee calculation it was a waste — young lives spent on an unprovable hope. But the God of the living was not in the habit of letting his friends fall into nothing. The Church that grew on that continent from their ashes is the historical form of the sentence "he is not the God of the dead, but of the living."
The first reading hands this fire forward as a personal charge. Paul writes to Timothy: "rekindle the grace of God, which is in you by the imposition of my hands. For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of self-discipline" (2 Tm 1:6-7). The gift is already given — at baptism, at confirmation, at ordination, at every laying-on of hands by which God has claimed a life. The danger is not that we lack it but that we let it cool. Lwanga's companions did the opposite: they fanned the small flame they had only just received until it outshone their fear. "Do not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord," Paul adds — and they were not.
Here the Bethlehem note sounds quietly and double. The God who comes small does not despise small and recent faith; he entrusts his greatest witness to the young, the poor, the lately-converted of every continent. And the Society born under a Swiss sky has always believed that the fire is rekindled best where it is handed across borders — that the gift laid on one life in one land is meant to blaze on another. The young men of Namugongo are not a closed chapter of African history; they are an open invitation, asking whether the grace already laid on us is being kept warm or left to go grey.
"He is not the God of the dead, but of the living." On this day the sentence has faces — young, dark, joyful, unafraid. The God who said I am at the bush still says it over every life he has claimed. The only question the day asks is whether we will let that fire stay banked, or rekindle it.
Scripture text: Catholic Public Domain Version (CPDV), public domain.
Prayer of the Day
God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, God of the living and not of the dead, you claim your friends with a love that the grave cannot cancel. By the witness of Saint Charles Lwanga and his young companions, who fanned the new flame of their faith until it outshone the fire that killed them, rekindle in us the grace already laid upon our lives. Give us not a spirit of fear but of power, of love, and of self-discipline, that we too may not be ashamed of your name. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
For Meditation
- Where have we let a gift God once laid on us — a call, a grace, a mission — go quietly grey?
- Do we read Scripture as a museum of dead names, or as the word of a God who still says "I am"?
- The martyrs of Namugongo were young and newly converted; whom are we tempted to think "too young" or "too new" to carry the fire?
