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| The Resurrection at Cookham Churchyard, Stanley Spencer, 1924-6 |
The reading we have just heard (Luke 20:27-38) is set for
last Sunday, the 3rd Sunday before Advent. We did not hear it then
because it clashed with Remembrance Sunday. I have chosen to use it today, as I
think there is something important we can learn from it.
At the time of Jesus there were several different religious traditions within Judaism, among them the traditions of the Sadducees and the Pharisees. There still are different Jewish traditions, just as we have many Christian traditions today. One of the points of difference then was about resurrection from the dead. As we’ve just heard, the Sadducees said there was no such thing, death was final. The Pharisees on the other hand believed that the righteous would be raised to eternal life at a time when God would vindicate his people and restore Israel.
Jesus himself believed in resurrection, so it is not surprising that a group of Sadducees should seek to undermine him by asking him a trick question. The law of Moses required, or at least encouraged, the brother of a dead man to marry his childless widow to raise up children in his name. So, they ask, if a woman marries 7 brothers successively, each of whom dies childless, whose wife would she be, when they all rise from the dead? It was unthinkable for Jews then, as it is for us now, for a woman to have more than one husband at the same time. They would catch Jesus out whatever he answered, or so they thought. Either he would have to say the resurrected woman was married to all 7 of them when they were all resurrected - unthinkable! - or he would have to agree with them that there was no resurrection.
But Jesus sidesteps their trick question. He declares that the resurrected ‘neither marry nor are given in marriage… They are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection’. He points out to the Sadducees that Moses himself spoke of ‘the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’, after their deaths. And he declares, God ‘is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive’.
Now, I know that I am mortal. I know I shall die, though not soon I hope. Just as my parents did, and theirs, and so back through the generations. I do not believe that I shall be resurrected in the sense that my physical body will somehow be put back together after it has returned to dust. That would be against the God-given laws of nature. But Jesus does not believe in resurrection like that either. My hope, in Jesus’s words, is to live in God’s eyes as an angel, a child of God, a child of the resurrection.
But how can that be? As a child of this age, I can only see my life and my destiny through the prism of the 4 dimensions of Einstein’s space-time continuum.
My life is like a thread winding through Space-time, beginning at my conception and ending at my death. Along the way my life-thread encounters, touches, curls around the life-threads of other people and of other creatures. My loving Father is not constrained by the 4 dimensions of space-time. I believe he perceives my whole life as one piece, just as he does the lives of each one of us. In his eyes, I am alive even though I die. And my worthiness is a function of the love I have shown to others and to him, integrated over my whole life-thread. His Son Jesus shows me he forgives me my lack of love at times, if I am contrite and change my ways. And his Holy Spirit works with my God-given conscience to guide me on the way.
I believe I shall abide after my death in the sight and close presence of God as a child of the resurrection, outside the four dimensions of space-time, as will those I love and every other person. God loves me for all my human flaws, as he loves us all. He knows me from the inside out, from my very beginning to my final end.
I am somewhat apprehensive about the process of dying, but I do not fear death. And neither should you!
