25th Sunday after Pentecost 10 November 2013

Sunday's readings:

Job 19:23-27a

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17

Luke 20:27-38

Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question...

• As the Church year closes, the readings for worship turn to the end of all things. So we hear of the resurrection of the dead in our readings. The lectionary – the list of assigned readings - is set up that way. We close out the year by thinking about what is to come, until we are face to face once again with the proclamation of the coming of Christ, both in Advent and in the return.
• All of the readings look to this. Job speaks of the Resurrection and seeing God after all his troubles. Paul writes to the Thessalonians about standing fast in their faith and in the teachings Paul left for them. It appears that others had been telling them they were missing or had missed “the Day of the Lord.” Finally in Luke's Gospel, Jesus deals with the trick question of the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead.
• The question posed by the Sadducees is a trick and a trap, but as with many questions, it reveals much about the asker. Since the Sadducees do not believe in a resurrection and any immortality for them comes from having children, they ask their question in a way that makes light of any believe in an afterlife. They assume that Jesus does believe in a resurrection and that his belief is such that the life to come is like the life led now.
• The Sadducees made the mistake of believing that Jesus believed that any resurrected life would be exactly like this life. Relationships would remain as they were; the rich would be rich and the poor remain poor. Marriages would endure. That then was the point where they hoped to catch Jesus. “In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her."
• Jesus quickly unmasks their trick and turns it around on them, using their own view of scripture to do so. “Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."
• The Sadducees held that only the Torah, the first 5 books of the Hebrew Bible were inspired. The rest – the Prophets, the Wisdom literature – were not inspired scripture and since they found no teaching of a resurrection in the Torah, they discounted it.
• Jesus sees through their scheme and says that things are and will be changed. What follows will not simply a continuation of what has preceded it. The resurrection will not be like the life before the resurrection of the dead.
• Now we don't exactly know what that entails either. We only have hints of what the resurrected life will be like. However, there are a few things we believe we know.
• We do not die and become angels. Jesus said they are like angels and the emphasis in on the “like.” There are folks even today that say we will be angels in heaven.
• We are born human beings and what God has created us to be, we will be. What that will be like is beyond us now.
• Jesus' own life on earth after the resurrection hold the hints. All we can safely say is that he was Jesus after the resurrection and he was different even as he remained who he was... and is.
• Beyond that (and even in that), we'd to well to avoid speculation beyond that. It's worthless at best and possibly spiritually dangerous. What is to come is absolutely unexpected. We'd also do well to take Paul's advise in his first Corinthian letter: But, as it is written,‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him’  (I Cor. 2:9)
• So what is left? We believe in a resurrection of the dead. So what is there for us now?
• Even now, our lives are changed by the Gospel. We are not what we were and all of this is unexpected. We are heralds of the Kingdom that is coming and is already here. In the here and now, we proclaim the Kingdom of God in what we say and do, whether the Kingdom comes in fifteen minutes or in a thousand years.
• Here are the words of a modern theologian in our tradition which I feel ties this up well: “There are people who regard it as frivolous, and some Christians think it impious for anyone to hope and prepare for a better earthly future. They think that the meaning of present events is chaos, disorder, and catastrophe; and in resignation or pious escapism they surrender all responsibility for reconstruction and for future generations. It may well be that the day of judgement will dawn tomorrow; and in that case, though not before, we shall gladly stop working for a better future.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)