A way of living and believing

 ‘…He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive....’ (Luke 20:38)

Luke 20:27-38 (Year C: Advent-3)

In this reading Jesus is put on the spot by a group called the Sadducees. These were a troublesome lot but, in a way, were quite 21^st century in thinking. According to that other Book thought to be written by Luke, The Acts of the Apostles (23:6-8), the Sadducees were those who believed that ‘there is no resurrection, and that there are neither angels nor spirits’. Very Dawkinsion! And if the truth be admitted these assumptions are very much lodged in the sub-conscious for modern-day believers and, also, for many since at least the time of the Enlightenment in Europe. 

Dawkins notwithstanding, the Sadducees constituted a particular brand of 1^st century religious fundamentalism.  They took their name from the priest Zadok (2 Samuel 8:17). For them, only the revelation contained in the writings of Moses were acceptable. These – by tradition – were believed to constitute the following Books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. All else after Moses was not acceptable. The notion of rising from the dead is a late development in Jewish thinking and belief as reflected in the late prophetic books of Daniel.  Does any of this sound remotely familiar to Christians in the 21^st century?

But, to counter the Sadducees there was another faction (isn’t it always so in the beginning, now and ever more?). The other faction were the Pharisees who believed and practiced according to the strictest code and blueprint. We see Pharisees and Sadducees all round us and we may be among them to some extent and at some times of our journey.  After all, like the Sadducees and Pharisees, we are only human.

The Pharisees (who already received very bad press in the gospels) and the Sadducees had at least one thing in common: they liked to ask plenty of questions to catch out Jesus. Let’s say they liked to complicate religion and, with it, life. And so do many of us – at times.

Posing questions that make no sense

Only the Sadducee mind-set could think up such a hypothetical and convoluted question as the one about the serial wife who married 7 brothers one after another. (We may note that the trick question posed is clearly based on the assumption that Jesus sided with the Pharisees on this matter of life after death and resurrection). Whose wife was she in the resurrection (which the inquirers didn’t believe in anyway)? The context was set by Deuteronomy 25:5 concerning ‘Levirate’ marriages (yet another example of how literalist and context-free interpretations of the scriptures is unhelpful).  A smart reply might have been ‘none of them’ (heaven is for getting away from all of that!) or, alternatively, all seven of them (heaven being a very big mansion), or alternatively the kindest of the seven (possibly not a bad answer!). But, Jesus doesn’t fall for the Sadducee trap. Neither does he waste time on the more obscure questions of philosophy and metaphysics. He gives an answer to a different question that the questioners had not even wrestled with. The evangelist, Matthew, gives an important clue to what is going on here (Matthew 22:29).

Jesus answered them, ‘You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.

The central message of Jesus throughout the gospels including this rather strange and puzzling story is that:

‘He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.’

Being fully alive today, now, here is what matters for there is only One God and to that God we are, all, alive no matter where we are, whom we are with, who we are and what we are doing.

A pledge of hope

But, our faith is more than a presence of love in our lives today. It is, also, a pledge of hope in the midst of weakness and questioning.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote on the 16^th July 1944 from his prison in Tegal near Berlin:

This is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions.  Man's religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world; he uses God as a Deus ex machina.  The Bible, however, directs him to the powerlessness and suffering of God; only a suffering God can help.  To this extent we may say that the process we have described by which the world came of age was an abandonment of a false conception of God, and a clearing of the decks for the God of the Bible, who conquers power and space in the world by his weakness.  This must be the starting point for our ‘worldly’ interpretation.

Resurrection is the sine qua non of Christian belief and practice. Without it we may resign ourselves to benevolent philanthropy and wisdom without hope of the beyond and, at the same time, the here and now breaking in of the Kingdom of God.

Perhaps the metaphor we need to work with nowadays is one that tells a story about a seed (as outlined in the first letter to the Corinthians). The seed dies (buried in the ground) but transforms into new life. There is a continuity and what was perishable in some mysterious way ‘lives on’ except in an entirely way.  It takes imagination and a leap in faith.  The intellectual underpinning is informed by a critical examination of the evidence – or the lack of it – combined with  an attitude of ‘not knowing’ leading to trust. We hear the word, we do not know how, we believe.

When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.1 Cor 15:37-38

Our faith is 2,000 years old but not our thinking….

After all disputation, after all our striving, after all our pain and suffering –

‘if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith’ (1 Cor 15:14)

When we say in the Creed: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” are we not reaffirming our hope, our intuition, our desire 

not because we have proven anything, 

not because the ‘evidence’ springs from learned experiments or deliberations, 

not because intellectual assent is the only game in town but, rather, 

because Someone has touched our lives and that made all the difference.  

Postscript

The great scholar and disciple, William Barclay, once wrote about this passage:

It may well be that we find this an arid passage. It deals with burning questions of the time by means of arguments which a Rabbi would find completely convincing but which are not convincing to the modern mind. But out of this very aridity there emerges a great truth for anyone who teaches or who wishes to commend Christianity to his fellows. Jesus used arguments that the people he was arguing with could understand. He talked to them in their own language; he met them on their own ground; and that is precisely why the common people heard him gladly. [Online source here]