During the week I was reading in the papers about the sad plight of those families who lost loved ones in the World Trade Center attacks. Now that it is certain that no more human remains will be recovered, bereaved families who have been denied the chance to bury their loved ones, have taken to placing some personal memorabilia of their deceased in urns and then interring these urns at the cemetery. Reading of the plight of these bereft and broken families left me feeling sad, but also set me wondering about the whole question of death and resurrection - particularly the question of the resurrection of the body and what we as a Christian people understand by that. I will return to this in a moment, but first let me make some brief comments on our first reading today from the second book of Maccabees.

It is the story of seven brothers and their mother who are martyred for their Jewish faith. The reading rather graphically depicts the cruel ways they met their end - thankfully, however, what we heard read a few moments ago was the censored, edited version! If you wish to indulge in the gore and entrails of the unedited version, then I refer you to the entire chapter seven of second Maccabees - not for the faint-hearted I assure you!

So, why were these brothers and their mother brutally tortured and murdered? Less than two hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Jews faced a cruel persecution that tried to stamp out the observances of their faith and replace them with Greek culture and ways. Those who resisted the Syrian authorities of the time were mercilessly disposed of. But the remarkable development that emerged at this time among the persecuted Jews, as illustrated in the reading from Maccabees, is the belief many of them had come to have in the resurrection of the dead to new life. As the point of his death approaches, one of the brothers bravely asserts to his executor: 'you are depriving us of this present life, but the King of the world will raise us up to live again forever.'

This theme of the resurrection of the dead is very much at the heart of our readings today. In our Gospel reading Jesus is ridiculed by the Sadducees who deny that there is a resurrection. So, what exactly do we, as a Catholic Christian people, believe and understand by resurrection of the person, body and soul, after death?

Well, firstly, I think it is very commonly accepted that the life of the human person continues in a spiritual form after death. The question is: how can we believe that this body, so clearly mortal and subject to decay, could rise to eternal life? We believe it because, firstly, God created us body and soul and secondly because God redeemed the whole human person in Jesus Christ his son. Therefore, just as Christ's body was glorified and transfigured after his resurrection, so, as Saint Paul declares, Christ 'will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body.' A 'spiritual body' if you will that has been transfigured.

Now all of this can, I'm sure, seem just a little heady and abstract. But I think the point of understanding and honoring the human person, body and soul, as one sacred entity, cannot be over stressed, especially when one considers some of the liberal and permissive ways our modern culture treats the human body. Every day the sacred dignity of the human body is violated by killings, rapes and stabbings. Every day the sacred gift of human sexuality is vulgarized and brutalized by the pornography industry, and every day children die in their thousands from slave labor and the ravages of famine. In so many ways the human person and the human body are defiled, demeaned, degraded and devalued in a world where life is cheap and disposable.

As a Christian people we are called to honor and reverence the human person, body and soul, in life and in death.