2 Thessalonians 2.1-17, Luke 20.27-38
The Third Sunday before Advent, 6 November 2016
Sparkford, Weston Bampfylde
This is a time of year for remembering. A time which raises for us all, questions of life and death. One question we might find ourselves asking is: what do we really believe happens after death?
Do we believe that those who pass on, have died, completely, absolutely; irreversibly gone?
Or do we believe that they are at peace - and if we do, what do we mean by that?
Or do we believe in something more positive, an afterlife or some sort, in a place which is now their home, where one day we might rejoin them?
Whatever we believe about death, it is an important question for us because it completely changes the way we think about God; and because it completely changes the way we behave in life.
In our gospel today Jesus had a debate with the Sadducees 'who deny the resurrection’. This is one of the more important passages in the New Testament - three of the Gospels present it almost identically, and in exactly the same place: just before the Passion.
The reason that it is important is that it tells us about how Jesus perceived God. Helps us to answer our questions about how God sees life and death.
Jesus was debating with the Sadducees, who were 'establishment' figures, for whom the only Sacred Scripture was Moses' books of the law. They believed that, if there really were a resurrection, then God would have told Moses, his prophet and friend, about it, and Moses would have put it into the books of the law.
But Moses didn't put it into the books of the law, so the Sadducees assumed that God must have told him nothing about this matter, and since God wouldn’t hide anything from Moses, this must mean that there is no resurrection.
But more than that, the Sadducees had better evidence still that there was no resurrection. There was a law in Deuteronomy which set out that, if a married man died without children, then it fell to his brother to take that man's widow as his wife so as to beget a child for his late brother, to keep the dead man's name going in the family line.
This law existed exactly because these people didn’t believe in a life-after-death; they had to find some way of beating death. They had to have a blessing in the land of the living. And, to them, the only way of beating death was by having children. The only way of having a blessing in the land of the living was by making sure they had descendants. It was because of this that the man who died without children needed his brother to get for him the share in posterity that he couldn't get for himself.
The Sadducees liked to prove their point by telling an ingenious little story - of seven brothers who died before having children, each passing the wife on a bit like a used car.
But Jesus is not impressed by this very clever argument. His reply is both direct and quite rude. They are wrong, he says, because they know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.
Marriage is something which people do in this world, Jesus says. But marriage is irrelevant to those who rise from the dead; they don’t get married because they are like angels.
In other words, marrying and giving in marriage are normal things which happen to those whose world is full of anxiety about overcoming death. For those who are not anxious about death, the reason for marriage, or for having children, is not about overcoming death. It is about celebrating life.
The important thing to grasp, Jesus says, is the power of God. He gives a quote from the book of Exodus, where God says to Moses: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’. [3]
The odd thing here is that God is telling Moses that he is the God of three people who were dead at the time, as far as Moses could tell. The way God is talking about them, though, it sounds like as God sees it, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive.
But Jesus is trying to help us begin to understand what the power of God might be about. That this 'power,' this quality which God always has and is, involves being completely and entirely alive, living without any reference to death. There is no death in God. God has nothing to do with death, and for that reason facts which are obvious to us, like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob having been long dead at the time of Moses, simply do not exist for God. As Jesus says in Luke, 'To God, all are alive' - to God, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive.
Let's put this another way: for us 'being alive' means 'not being dead'; We know we're alive because we're not dead. For God this is simply not the case. For God being alive has nothing to do with death, and can't even be contrasted with death.
This is really important. Jesus saw God as being radically alive, not mortal, not immortal, but a-mortal, in no way shaded by death. Those who started the dispute with him just couldn’t see God in this way, their whole way of seeing is distorted because it is stuck in a vision which flows from death to death, blind to God - who is the entirely death-less One.
Now, if we are honest we have to admit that what Jesus said to the Sadducees probably applies to us. It was not only the Sadducees who were mistaken about the resurrection - we also are trapped by our anxieties about death. If only we really believed only in life! We're all quite often mistaken in the way we see the world, and the things of God. It's part of the human condition.
At this time of year, as we remember the conflicts of the last century where the slaughter of millions was sanctioned by each and every religion - is it possible for us to begin believing that God is not, after all, a vicious wrathful God obsessed with vengeance and human sacrifice, a God wrapped up in death; but rather is a God of love, a God of life?
Jesus came to tell us, and to make possible for us to believe, that God is entirely different from what the religions of warring nations imagine. His Good News is a story about a God entirely disconnected from death. The Good News is that death is for God, something that is not. 'To God, all are alive'.
Their anxiety about death made the Sadducees create marriage laws which protected their family line through generations. Those sorts of laws still exist in our world, because those anxieties sorts of still exist, and we’re influenced by them.
This is a great shame because if we are anxious about death then we’re unlikely to take risks, to be creative, to live a little dangerously occasionally, pushing life to its limits to enjoy it as much as possible. What difference would it make to us if we believed only in life?
If we believed only in life - would we begin to see our faith overcoming our fears, our aspirations eclipsing our apprehension, our passions defeating our paranoias?
We have learned today that Jesus wants us to be free of anxieties about death and dying. He yearns for us to stop spending so much time focussing on death, and for us instead to tune-in to believing only in life. He longs for us to embrace the God who is God not of the dead, but of the living.
It is a mystery which will take us a long, long, time to unravel; how to open our eyes to see God like this, and to learn to see life like God does.
But Jesus is telling us that if we embrace God we can become people who believe only in life, completely focussed on life, full of life; living lives of hope - full of immortality. [4]
Notes
[1] Amended from a sermon of the same title first preached at the Church of the Good Shepherd, Liverpool, 2004.
[2] This sermon borrows very heavily and unashamedly from Chapter Two of James Alison's Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination, which was recommended by Paul Neuchterlein’s very excellent site Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary: Understanding the Bible Anew Through the Mimetic Theory of René Girard.
[3] Luke 20.37, quoting Exodus 3.6, 15, 16.
[4] Wisdom 3.
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