Luke 20:27-38
Proper 27 / Year C
There are any
number of religious groups populating the Holy Land during Jesus’ days;
including the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
Sadducees are aristocrats who, because they cooperate with the Roman
occupiers, hold positions of power. Pharisees
are more blue collar. Their place is out
among the people in the synagogues of towns and villages. And while there are other things which
distinguish one group from the other, this morning we hear of the most
significant: Pharisees believe in some form of life after death while Sadducees
don’t.
If anyone ever
invites you to attend a theological debate, take my advice and find a polite
way to decline. They tend to be deadly
dull affairs where long dead writers and unpronounceable German words are
tossed around as if they part of everyone’s daily lexicon. It was not like this in first century
Palestine. Back then, competing groups
went after each other with passion and energy, most often debating absurd possibilities,
but at least they were something even common folk like you and me could
understand.
The hypothetical
question about in heaven who will be the husband of the women who marries
successive brothers is typical of the discourse between these two groups; concoct
an extreme scenario and then throw it out there for debate. It is not unlike the Philosophy 101 question “Can
God create something so big God cannot move it?” Such juicy conundrums can create lively
discussion. And while I have no evidence
to back up my theory, I doubt the Sadducees in today’s reading are the first to
ask this question. No doubt it has been kicked
around for some time. And, in my estimation,
it is not the first time Jesus has heard it, but this perhaps is the first time
he is asked to comment on it in public.
In his response,
Jesus does two things to reframe the conversation. First, he draws a contrast between what he
calls “this age” and “that age” of the resurrection of the dead. His message is straightforward: You can spend
a lot of time and energy trying to image what the resurrection life is like,
but you are locked into and limited by what you presently know and
experience. The life to come is wholly
other and it is near futile trying to describe it based on what we know of life
in the here and now. As one commentator
puts it, “Jesus asserts the rules we put in place to navigate this world are not
important, or even relevant, in the next one, because it is so fundamentally
different from what we normally experience.”
We get glimpses of
this in the biblical accounts of Jesus’ appearances after his
Resurrection. Sometimes he is
recognizable, other times he is not. He
has a physical body which still shows the marks of his wounds from the
Crucifixion and can be touched, and yet he materializes in locked rooms and
then disappears from them. He eats and
drinks with his friends before he ascends into the sky in bodily form. Theorize if you must, debate all you want, raise
your voice and shake a fist to make your point, but perhaps it is best to say
apparently “that age” is very different from “this age” and leave it at that.
The second thing Jesus does to change the conversation is to pivot from what in symbolic logic is known as the specific to the universal. He moves away from the question of marriage in the resurrection to the real question of the resurrection itself. For Jesus, God’s revelation to Moses that the Patriarchs live and somehow are present in the present moment is evidence enough. When today’s text states “for to God all of them are alive” it hits on something critical. It affirms in the realm where God exists, they live. What is this reality which I just said is best left undescribed?
All of creation,
including us, exists in time and space.
It has a beginning, has moved into the present movement, and will
continue to move until it comes to an end.
God, who has no beginning and no end, exists beyond time and space, and
yet can and does, in some form or fashion, enter into time and space; self-revelation,
the Incarnation, and the imparting of the Holy Spirit being primary examples. Because God exists beyond time and space, all
of time is present to God; certainly the past and the present and in ways I
don’t understand and can’t explain even the future (to some degree).
Perhaps a limited
way to illustrate this is to image taking a picture of yourself from every one
of your birthdays and then laying them out in front of you on a table in order. In a sense, you can look down from above at
your whole life laid out before you. Each
moment is present to you manifested through a photograph, but you exist in a reality
beyond them. An exercise like this would
bring to the present past memories, some so real and evocative you can be
caught up in them again.
Now, as I said,
this example has its limitations because Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (whom Jesus
references) are not mere memories, figures God has not forgotten. They are resurrected from the dead, which is
to say they now dwell with God in that place and age beyond time and
space. To go back to the photographs, it
is as if every person in those pictures who has died sits with you at the table
and now looks down at the snapshots with you.
As I said, I have
no idea of what “that age” will be like.
I am pretty sure it won’t involve floating around on a cloud while
playing a harp. But my hope is this is
the life to which one day, through the grace and power of God, I will enter. Now, hope is not the same thing as a
wish. I define hope as a trust in a
future reality which has implications for how you live and order your life
today. Because I had hope a college
education would make for a better life, my parents paid tuition while I
attended classes, read books, wrote papers, and took tests. Because I hope my future will be better
served by having a retirement account, I refrain from spending a certain amount
of my income and invest it so it will accumulate and grow. Hope is acting in a certain way now consistent
with what you believe will be realized in the future.
The Catechism in
the prayer book asks, “What is the Christian hope?” Its answer: The Christian hope is to live
with confidence in newness and fullness of life, and to await the coming of
Christ in glory, and the completion of God’s purpose for the world.” p.
861 I invite you to live with
confidence in the fulness of life which is ours in part today and in that age will
be complete.
