The Resurrection of the Body

Pope John Paul II began the Third Cycle of his reflections, this time on the Resurrection of the Body and how this fundamental article of our faith sheds light on marriage and celibacy (or continence for the “sake of the Kingdom”), by meditating on Christ’s conversation with the Sadducees, who denied the reality of the resurrection. This dia-logue is found in a passage in Matthew 22:24-30 (with parallels in Mk 12:18-27 and Lk 20: 27-40).

Christ’s conversation with the Sadducees regarding the future resurrection of the body is crucially important for two reasons: first, it forms the third component of what the Holy Father calls “the triptych of words that are essential and constitutive for the the-ology of the body.” The other two passages are: the one in which Christ refers to the “beginning” and the one in which He appeals to “purity of heart.” Second, its contents “have an essential meaning for the theology of the body.” Moreover, Christ’s words re-garding the resurrection in his conversation with the Sadducees “have a fundamental im-portance for understanding marriage in the Christian sense and also ‘the renunciation of conjugal life’ for the kingdom of heaven.”