Resurrection (Luke 20:27-38)

                                                                 Proper 27C 2013

Haggai 1:15-2:9; Ps 145; 2Thess. 2; Luke 20:27-38

Father Adam Trambley

November 10, 2013, St. John’sSharon

In today’s gospel the Sadducees come up to trap Jesus.  The Sadducees were a Jewish group of Jesus’ time

who were closely tied to the Temple and to the political structures in Jerusalem.  One of their defining theological beliefs was that there was no resurrection, but they weren’t trying to trip up Jesus for doctrinal purposes.  They were playing politics, but they used theology as a way to get at him.  Jesus’ response avoids their games, while affirming the centrality of the resurrection for our faith.

The Sadducees ask about a Jewish custom of people marrying their brother’s widow to raise up children for his name.  Without spending too much time trying to understand this tribal-era oddity of an earlier time, we could ask the question about people generally who are remarried.  In heaven, the Sadducees wonder, whose wife will the woman be? 

Jesus doesn’t spend a much time playing the Sadducees’ games.  Marriage isn’t needed in heaven the way we need it to on earth, he seems to say.  He tells the Sadducees that instead of arguing immaterial details you don’t understand, focus on what really matters – resurrection.  Resurrection and being children of the resurrection is the point, and we know we get there because God is not God of the dead, but of the living.

Resurrection is our hope.  Part of why resurrection matters is that it takes seriously both the tragedy of death and the immeasurable greatness of God in overcoming death.  

This weekend a number of our young people died tragically and suddenly.  In the Philippines, thousands were killed by one of the worst storms on record.  Hundreds of others died of starvation, disease and violence.  Some died of what we call old age.  In the past twenty-four hours, approximately one-hundred-fifty-thousand people died, and each and every one was a terrible tragedy.  Certainly some died at a time when their mortal bodies had worn out and the time had come for them to be released from their pain and suffering, and their death was the lesser of two evils. 

But we were not made for death.  We were made for unending physical life in the midst of this beautiful creation.  Death is a result of sin.  Death comes because we have turned away from God who is the source of our life, and once we turn away for even the briefest time, decay follows and our mortal bodies deteriorate and eventually we die; or we die suddenly as a result of the sickness, disease, accident or even malicious will that entered into creation at some previous point when the children of God turned to their own ways.  God never intended death, and our deaths aren’t the results of God wanting us with him or because he decided we were supposed to die at a specific time.  The Greeks believed the fates controlled our times of deaths, but they were pagans without hope.  God never wanted any of us to die, and he is always looking for opportunities to bring us abundant life for all times and places.

At our deaths, and especially at the deaths of young people, the plans of God are frustrated for a time.  Why God allows such things, I cannot claim to know.  We can talk about free will, and human choices, and many other things, but the evil present in premature death is beyond our comprehension.  We cannot spiritually or rationally make sense of evil and death because such things can exist only in the absence of the light of God that illuminates our minds and warms our hearts. 

God’s response to the evil of death is something we can talk about, however, and that response is three-fold.  God’s most important and final response to evil, death and all human brokenness is resurrection.  We are to be raised.  We know this because Jesus was raised, the first fruits of all those who fall asleep.  The tomb was empty and a group of people had an experience of the risen Lord Jesus that was so profound that it reshaped their entire lives, sending them forth with such power that they changed the world.  This transformation and power is unmistakable and a historical fact, and their cause is Jesus’ resurrection.  Jesus experienced death as we did and defeated it – once and for all.  His resurrection opened the door to our resurrection to new life.

This resurrection is a resurrection of the body.  We profess this in the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds.  Jesus is going to restore us to the physical, unending life that we were always meant to have.  We are going to be like him, in a body that maintains some sort of connection with the bodies we currently have, while also being incorruptible and perfect in ways we only can begin to conceive today.

This resurrection is going to happen at the end of this world, at the end of this age, when the ascended Jesus comes back from wherever exactly he went when he was taken up to heaven in bodily form.  We don’t quite know how everything will happen, we don’t know where Jesus is now, and we certainly don’t know the day or the time.  We only know our hope which is for nothing less than the full resurrection of our physical bodies as they were supposed to be, and an eternal life with all the saints who are resurrected with us.  We will spend eternity living in such a richness and depth of love and joy that the Sadducees questions about marriage will seem as sweet and immaterial as a six-year old asking us how many best friends they can have in heaven.  In God we will all be so closely united that the closest relationships we have now will pale before our love for our slightest heavenly acquaintances, and all of our love for God and our neighbors will grow deeper and deeper throughout eternity.    

Resurrection is the first great response of God to death, which is completion of Jesus Christ’s final victory over death.  God’s second response is the saving each and every one of us individually from death at the end of our own mortal lives.  God rescues us from death and preserves us somehow until the final resurrection.  Anglicans tend to call the place we go “paradise” because on the cross Jesus says to the thief who repented, “This day you will be with me in paradise.” 

At our Diocesan Eucharist, Father Brian reminded us that the word we translate savior means healer or rescuer, so that a better way to think of Jesus might be as our lifeguard or EMT.  At the moment when we come to death, Jesus acts as our lifeguard.  Through his defeat of death, he is able to come and snatch as away so that death cannot claim us.  We don’t go down into some shadowland, or disappear into nothingness, or get reborn into something else, or reap some imagined punishment for our sinfulness, or turn into part of a zombie army, or whatever is believed by those without hope.  Instead, as our bodies die and await resurrection, some real piece of who we are is preserved in a good place while we await Jesus’ return.  We understand this paradise as a place where we might have contact with our loved ones and where we are in the presence of God.  In many ways this place may seem nicer to us than our mortal existence, since there we are free from pain and suffering.   This blessed place is God’s deliverance for those whose bodies have worn out, and for those who die suddenly or much too young.  Paradise is part of God’s redemption of the tragedy of death – perhaps not his original plan, but a way to salvage something good out of death while we await our final resurrection. 

Third, God is always present with people in the midst of death, as well, just as he is in the midst of all tragedies.  His comfort and healing are present, and he brings whatever good is possible out of any individual death.  We know of deaths that have made others aware of problems in ways that have helped others not to die from similar causes, whether specific accidents, illnesses, or environmental contaminants.  Sometimes the hopelessness of death draws people to God or forces them to rely on him more.  Sometimes a death pulls people together.  God doesn’t cause people to die to accomplish these types of plans, but when people die, he will always bring forth whatever good can come out of a tragedy.  These acts that redeem death and use even this apparent victory of the enemy for God’s purpose are only the preparation for the ultimate victory of God, the final resurrection.

The resurrection is our hope.  As Paul says, if there is no resurrection, we of all people are most to be pitied.  But we know that the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead will also raise our mortal bodies to the fullness of a physical life beyond anything we can ask or imagine. We will be citizens of the New Jerusalem with those who are coming after us and with all those who have gone before, and Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God will be at the center.  God is not God of the dead, but of the living.  In him, we will all be alive.