IThe Book of Maccabees at a time when fidelity to the Covenant is custom with the pious traditions of the Fathers expose to persecution e at death he is capable of bringing the faith of Israel to a proclamation e almost unprecedented of hope in the resurrection. Everything is possible and everything is “Patible” when from God one has the hope of “being resurrected again”.
The horizon of the resurrection, ridiculed by the “Sadducees” who do not they believe because they are satisfied and attached to the resources of a rich and comfortable life, it is what the Lord Jesus refers to not as a consoling miracle rather as a seal of a relationship between manand God who, if authentic, will not it can only be eternal since God “is not of the dead, but of the living”. All that which enters the paschal logic of Christ who, according to the word of the apostle, “he loved us” cannot be prey to death that he can take only and exclusively what our egoism already has delivered. The “mother” of seven children and the “wife” of seven husbands are icons of a given life that cannot be prey to death, but is already part of it of the eternal resurrection. In a reality like ours where the pressure more and more massive globalization risks flattening humanity into a kind of lowest common denominator, the risk is to be deprived of the jolts of originality of every culture linked to a piece of indispensable land, the diversity of climates and foods, the different ways of understand and live the relationships between people, elements that are expressed in multiple symbols and uses. So the Word of God invites us to resist, not certainly – except in rare cases that life and history require – to a victimistic attitude, but to a disposition of solidarity and of admiration for the different identities that make the colors and flavors of humanity.

Commentary by b. Michael David, osb Novalesa Abbey

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves, Prinknash Abbey