This is a message given when I filled in for a vacationing pastor of Luke 20:27-38. Jesus is confronted with a riddle of one woman who had 7 husbands. He is asked who will be her husband in the resurrection. It's a question about is there really life after death.
I teased your pastor that she must have looked at today’s text and decided it was a good weekend to take vacation. This is what you call a “tough text.” As a seminary student, I’m familiar with debating questions of life after death and resurrection. Yet it is a far different experience trying to explain or understand such concepts when one is experiencing the emotional gravity and painful isolation of grief. What do you say when a child asks, “Where is mommy now? Will I ever see her again?” That is the moment smart theories lose their zeal and your gut aches with the true mystery of God and God’s plans for us.
Death can suck the faith right out of you. Maybe that is one reason we live in such denial of the topic. We try so hard to keep its reality from touching us. We have people die in hospitals, we have funeral homes to deal with the bodies for us, we pay money to make our dead look like they were alive, some of us keep our children from funerals, and for some the subject of death is a forbidden conversation. We are appalled by death, hide from it, or just plain ignore it until it comes knocking on our doors. Yet, when we receive news of a terminal diagnosis or experience the death of someone very significant, we can’t get enough information about death and have a voracious desire to ask the deep questions of life after death. We long to know if the one’s we have lost, if we ourselves will continue on or if death is final. We long to end the deep isolation and fear that our grief evokes. What happens next is a hope-filled mystery.
In today’s text, Jesus is in Jerusalem and is on his way to the cross. Every time he speaks, someone is out to trick him and find something to charge him with. And so he encounters the Sadducees.
Sadducees only followed the first five books of the Bible; they rejected the idea of resurrection, an afterlife, angels and other principalities because they were not mentioned in those books. The Pharisees on the other hand regarded the first five books, the prophets’ writings, wisdom literature, and oral tradition all to be valid scripture, most of what we study today. The Sadducees were wealthy, upper crust socialites who were in alignment with the Roman government and only served the temple in Jerusalem. They faded away after the temple was destroyed.
Their question to Jesus is intended to prove how ludicrous and irrational the concept of a resurrection is. Yet Jesus points out a radical thought, that what happens next is not a continuation of life as we know it. The Sadducees take life as we experience it now and project it into life after death. It’s a popular mistake. Think of all the images of heaven you’ve been exposed to. Heaven is imagined as some kind of wonderful theme park where everything is as it is now – only perfect. Everyone is happy, healthy, wealthy and wise – life is a continuous afternoon on a Caribbean beach where you can eat all the ice cream you want and always look perfect. Heaven is the “better place” where every soul is “better off.” Likewise, Hell is imagined as the worst moment of this life continuously played out.
However, what happens next is a hope-filled mystery. When Jesus says there is no marriage in the resurrection, Jesus is explaining that the resurrection is a new creation. At that time, women were the property of their husband with the job of producing an heir, so a family lived on. Jesus is letting us know that in the resurrection we experience a complete revolution of relationships where we will no longer relate to one another in roles of power versus powerlessness, no more divisions, no more death, no more pain but an entirely new experience of life.
The reality is there is no complete description of heaven or resurrection life in the Bible. Clearly any descriptions would require human ability to understand. Trying to understand heaven is like explaining an iPhone to a 1st century Sadducee. So here lie the dilemma, we naturally think about the future in a way that is somehow based on our experience, past and present. This future, the kingdom come, is not based on anything we’ve known. What happens next is a hope-filled mystery.
Resurrection is a tough concept to comprehend. Maybe that is why the idea of immortality of the soul seems easier to digest than resurrection of the body. Immortality of the soul was a Greek concept taught by Socrates and Plato in which the soul is good and lives eternally but the body is bad and is discarded in death. This is not a Christian concept. Resurrection of the body is what Jesus taught. Resurrection is not some sort of resuscitation of more of the same. This body we have hurts. It has pain. It needs to eat to survive. It has biological drives. This body fails you. This body needs to die. This body will return to dust and ash, whether naturally or speeded up by cremation. Resurrection is not a continuation of this life. Resurrection is not carrying on of a family line. There is a physical resurrection, but not a fleshly resuscitation. I will not have THIS body again.
This is not an easy thing to grasp, especially since most of us try to avoid the topic of death and the afterlife. However, what happens next is a hope-filled mystery. Jesus is a resurrected body and we also will be a resurrected person. Only the living can experience that which lives; only the living can encounter the “Living God.” God is God of the living. So we are alive, will be alive in God, will not just be floating spirits, but truly alive.
But we’re not dead yet, so how do we live as truly alive as we possibly can in this life? We take this knowledge of a hope-filled mystery, concerning resurrection and life after death, and transform our living now. God’s new life breaks into our here and now. Where is God at work in your life today? God is doing new things now and with resurrection eyes we are empowered to recognize such hope today. In the Lord’s Prayer we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done here on earth as in heaven.” We are the hands and feet of that kingdom. We are the children of God now and that means we are being called and sent in this present moment to create spiritual community, share in relationships of love, show compassion, and basically bring heaven to earth now. What we do now matters.
Our belief in the resurrection is based upon a relationship of faith we have with God as creator, redeemer, and Spirit. I know that my redeemer lives. We have been given the companionship of the Holy Spirit to guide and orient us in the dizziness of death and grief. God has a plan that includes life after death. We know because the Spirit is present with us illuminating our senses to the dark mysteries of what comes next. We can trust God in these questions. God is God of the living, so knowing what happens next is a hope-filled mystery we shout the words of Paul “Oh Death where is your Sting? Oh grave where is your victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:55)
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