“And after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God…” “At my vindication I shall see your face…” “God who gave us eternal comfort and good hope…” “He is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” “Make us children of God and heirs of eternal life…” It seems clear enough to me the theme we are supposed to see as we near the end of our adventure through Luke; I’m thinking the creators of the Lectionary wanted people to hear about hope this Sunday. It is just a guess. But, after a summer and most of the fall full of discipleship and faith in the here and now it seems to be time for us to turn our attention to the future. Jesus has entered Jerusalem for the last time but we won’t hear the end of that story for a while, instead our liturgical calendar is about to turn over to Advent, the time when we await not only Jesus’ coming on Christmas, but his coming again to usher in a new creation. The people who developed the lectionary have decided that we need to get ready for the future. On this Veteran’s Day it seems appropriate that we spend some time dealing with the supreme hope of the Christian faith; our hope in the resurrection.
Despite what we might think, the resurrection of the dead was not a settled issue within Judaism as Jesus walked the earth. We often think that because we have a Judaic lineage and we believe in the resurrection of the dead that it was what “the Jews believed.” But this is a mistake. The Jews were not a monolithic group of people; they were split into many schools of thought, not unlike our denominations in Christianity. One of those groups we learn about today. The Sadducees were the upper class of their day. They were the rulers and the priests; the learned who could read; they were the most comfortable with the way life was; the most excited to keep things the way they were. And so, they were very conservative in their theology; only recognizing the first five books of the Hebrew Bible as authoritative. In those five books they found no support for this relatively new fangled superstition of the resurrection of the dead; God’s final reversal of fortune; the ultimate putting of things to rights; so they refused to believe in it.
Their refusal to believe in the bodily resurrection of the dead earns them a lot of flack, but it seems to me to be somewhat justifiable. Certainly each of us has found some new idea hard to wrap our mind around; Christian history is full of debates between thoughtful people who have different understandings of the Christian tradition. There were those who found the idea of God in three persons to be too much to handle. There were some who took offense to the ordering of ministry; deacon, priest, and bishop. There are some who see the gifts of tongues and healing to be scams. We all have our reasons for not accepting different pieces and parts of the larger Judeo/Christian story. We can sort of understand where they are coming from. And so, we also understand the tactic these men employ to prove Jesus and the Pharisees wrong. “If you think that someone has silly ideas or a stupid stance on a given issue, then one way to reveal your opinion is to construct an absurd scenario and try to force the other person to enter it while trying to answer your question.”[1] It is fun to watch the other person wiggle around uncomfortably while they try to fit within your crazy scenario.
Jesus, however, doesn’t wiggle around uncomfortably, but rather steps right over the pile of bull dung in his path. He deals with the question head on. His answer is in two parts. First, he points out that the assumption underlying the question is faulty. “Within the resurrection life there is no room for silly legal matters.” The age to come is not merely a repeat of the present age, but one so vastly different that the ways in which we understand relationships now won’t make sense. The assumption that the 1st century institution of marriage will exist in the resurrection is as absurd as the assumption that the 21st century institution of marriage is the same as it was in the 1st century. “Instead,” Jesus says, “be content in the fact that we will be called ‘children of God.’” Place your hope in that!
Secondly, he argues from within their own Biblical text for the concept of the resurrection of the dead. Jesus, who himself was the Word of God, interprets the well known story from Exodus 3 for them. “Now, if it weren’t for the fact that Jesus himself made this argument, we could almost conclude that the way he goes about claiming the truth of the resurrection is a little lame. We could read the story of the Burning Bush from Exodus a thousand times and never stumble onto the idea that God’s reference to being the God “of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” could be used to prove the resurrection of the dead.”[2] Nonetheless, precisely because it comes from Jesus, we are quick to accept his interpretation; he might, I think, have some insight into the scriptures. “When God identifies himself in terms of the Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – or for that matter when we identify God as the God of Mom and Dad, Grandpa and Grandma before that, and so many more who have come before us in that ‘great cloud of witnesses’ [which we celebrated last week] we are not merely referencing history. This not who God WAS but who God IS. God has no past tense.”[3] To be sure this argument is a matter of rabbinical wordplay. It was true to the way in which the rabbis argued with each other routinely; “I will prove my point by spinning your own words.” But then Jesus steps out of word play and moves into truth, “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living,” and then in a text exclusive to Luke he adds, “for to him all are alive.”
The belief in the resurrection is not just the result of a series of mind-bending-riddle-like arguments, but is based solidly on what we say about God. Let me say that again, “The Christian hope depends, not upon wishful thinking, but upon the very nature of the God we believe in.”[4] From the Garden of Eden to Noah to Abraham to Moses to David to Jesus and the Holy Spirit and beyond, it is clear throughout the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the continuing existence of the Church that God is a God who “enters into a personal relationship with human beings, and that relationship cannot be destroyed, even by death.”[5] What once seemed like an absurd superstitious belief in life after death is proved by these words of Jesus to be true to the very nature of God. God does not break relationship. Even when we fail to do his will, when we eat of the forbidden fruit, when we doubt his ability to save, when we go our own way, God is faithful to his promises. That is where our hope lies, not in ourselves, but in the faithfulness of God.
This absurd superstition turned ultimate hope for the future is then our motivation to act in faith now. As Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope, encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word.” The strength we find in our hope of the resurrection of the dead motivates us to first and foremost share that hope and secondly to do whatever we can to bring glimpses of that resurrection life to the world around us.
This is the turn our lectionary founders wanted us to make. They wanted us to see the hope for the future that will come with our celebration of Christ as King in a couple of weeks. They wanted us to prepare for the hope that entered into the world on Christmas Day. They wanted us to get a glimpse of the hope of the age to come. They hoped that we might begin to make a connection between our faith and work in the here and now and our good hope in our God to whom and in whom all are alive, so that “having this hope, we may purify ourselves as Jesus is pure.” That is the hope that Job carried inside him in the midst of the worst turn of fate in history, it is the hope that Paul offered the church in Thessalonica, and it is the hope that each of us is offered by the God of our salvation. Be strengthened by that hope. Amen.
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