“What the brothers stress over and over again to their persecutors is that they expect a life beyond this one...What gives the torturers and and oppressors in any age their power is the conviction that this life and the goods in it constitute the whole of reality”

“We must not tame our vision, reduce our hope to something that we can imagine, lest we fall into the trap of believing in the kind of afterlife that the Sadducees (ancient and contemporary) find is easy to mock”

“Each of us faces the temptation of replacing the Kingdom Jesus promises to the children of the resurrection with our own limited ambitions”

“Christ, born into this world, does not marry or have children because he is to be the beginning of the new life where there is no death. Instead, in that life, we share in the common sonship of Christ, waiting to complete that sharing by our own resurrection.”

“Well could you imagine what a rose was going to look like when you were only looking at the seed? What we have today and what we know of what that will look like is like we're looking at the seed. We cannot imagine what comes beyond it.”

“The woman in this story is not to be remembered for the 7 husbands she had but as embraced by God who remembers her for the 7 times she became a victim of her social context and the 7 times she suffered grief and degradation and unfulfilled hopes”

“suprarational things we don't see because they shed too much light, they overwhelm reason. Jesus' strategy here is to show that the resurrection of the dead is a suprarational reality”

“Precisely because the world is created, nothing in the world is God. It all reflects God, yes. It all speaks of God, of course. But none of it is God. That means I should never make anything in this world the ultimate value of my life.”

“We don’t have to know exactly what awaits us, we just need to have faith that God’s promise of eternal life is true and live our lives accordingly in the here and now, bringing about peace and justice to resurrect our communities and nations”

“Caring for our soul in light of Eternal Life means that we need to change our horizon. We need to enlarge our view to see what God sees: our soul and its needs to enter into Eternal Life.”

“We must live every single day of our lives as if it is our last day. And let this enable us to ‘rise’ constantly whenever we fall, for sin buries us in the world, but reconciliation with God raises us to new life.”

“When we come together as church - as a community of people from all races, economic status, and life circumstances - we live this vision of being the children of God, the children of the resurrection”

“Heaven, after all, is the wedding feast of the Lamb of God. The spiritual union of all mankind in God is a sort of heavenly marriage to everyone, a pure communion of love.”

“We’ve got to be there for each other, helping each other out. Look for God in others we encounter, and let God use you as His instrument.”

“In the face of suffering and death, our hope brings us back to the love of God made visible in Christ. He is our life.”

“The great way Jesus affirmed the hope for resurrection was by his own rising from the dead. Actions speak louder than words: Jesus’s resurrection does not only tell us that the dead will rise, it causes the dead to rise.”

“the power of evil to destroy is as nothing compared with the goodness of God who makes all things out of nothing, who can even raise the dead to life”

“it's those who believe as those 7 heroic brothers did in the Old Testament, those who believe as Jesus did in life after death that are most committed to justice”

“What he's saying is resurrected life will be greater than marriage because an intimacy will be achieved that is beyond our imagining”

“we look for the resurrection of the dead, we await the resurrection of the body. Higher, more beautiful, elevated, transformed and transfigured life through God's love.”

“Heaven is a place, listen now, where our bodiliness will be so rich and so intense that we will be able to relate to all those around us in the most intimate, powerful and rich way possible”