November 8, 1998
Spokane, WA
One of my closest friends is a guy named Phil and I’ve known Phil since
my sophomore year in college. Phil was raised in a religious family but
by the time I knew him, he wasn’t interested in the church or spirituality in
general. Well, whenever we would start to talk about religion, the
conversation would inevitably come back to the afterlife. In fact, for Phil,
the question that religion was supposed to answer was “What happens
when we die?” And I must admit I was frustrated by this, because that
was never the central question I was asking whenever I studied religion
academically or even a question I asked in my own faith journey. The
question for me was NOT, “what happens when I die?” but “how do I live
NOW? How do I wake up in the morning and find some meaning in a
world that so often seems meaningless?” And when we would talk, it was
so apparent that this major difference made it almost impossible to talk to
each other about God. We were asking two different questions.I expect
a lot of us think in those terms, in terms of “what happens when I die?”
when we think about what questions religion is supposed to answer. I
came from a Southern Baptist tradition that put a lot of emphasis on what
happens when you die and WHERE YOU ARE GOING WHEN YOU DIE.
But I think I was lucky because the particular Baptists that guided me in
my faith journey put a lot more emphasis on the “What does it mean to
live now?”question than the “Where am I going when I die?” question.
And to be honest, I think the way they guided me was a much more
Biblical way than those who put a lot of emphasis on the afterlife.
The passage we have before us is one of the few Scriptures where we
have Jesus talking about what happens when you die. Jesus never
brings it up that much and neither does the rest of the New Testament.
We simply do not have an elaborate or detailed idea about what exactly
greets us after death. I mean, Jesus does say some things, but its always
as a tag-on to some teaching or parable with a very different focus than
the afterlife. And when he does talk about it, its in instances like this,
when someone is asking him for his opinion, or, in this case, when they
are hoping to trap him with this puzzle about the resurrection. You see,
the people asking him this question, the Sadducees, were different from
the folks we always hear a lot about in the Gospels, the Pharisees. The
Sadducees were the elite, well-educated class of religious people who
were connected to the Roman government and the religious power
structure of the Temple in Jerusalem in Jesus’ day. One of the things
that differentiated them from the Pharisees was the fact that they denied
the existence of angels and of a bodily resurrection. And so these fairly
important people, the Sadducees, come up to Jesus to try to trip him up
by forcing Jesus to admit how absurd it was to believe in a bodily
resurrection. They put a puzzle before Jesus that goes like this:
Teacher, Moses laid it down for us that if there are brothers, and one
dies leaving a wife but no child, then the next should marry the widow
and provide an heir for his brother. Now, there were seven brothers: the
first took a wife and died childless; then the second married her, then the
third. In this way the seven of them died leaving no children. Last of all,
the woman also died. At the resurrection, therefore, whose wife is she to
be, since all seven had married to her?” You know, its actually pretty
clever question. The Sadducees knew that Mosaic Law, the religious
Law of the Old Testament, had a rule that made sure that everyone’s
family name was carried on in Israel, hence the reason for the brother
marrying his brother’s widow. In a tribal culture when those Laws were
given, back in Moses’ day when Israel was wandering the desert, it was
really important to have as many children as possible because the
harshness of desert life usually killed many of the children early in their
lives. So, the Sadducees who rejected the idea of the bodily
resurrection, ask Jesus to explain HOW this little interesting puzzle would
work out. What makes this interesting is that, in Moses day, there was
no belief in the resurrection of the dead, at least as far as we know.
Moses, and Israel up until about 300 years before Jesus’ birth believed
that everyone, good or bad, went to the place of dead, Sheol. You see
that word, Sheol, a lot in the Psalms, when David cries out to God to ask
God not to let him go to Sheol. But by Jesus’ time, belief in the
resurrection of the body, the belief that our bodies would come with us
into the next life, albeit in a very different form, that belief was pretty well
accepted by Judaism. And Jesus and the Church have affirmed that
belief. We see next how Jesus answers the Sadducees in this
passage…”Jesus said to them, ‘The men and women of this world marry;
but those who have been judged worthy of a place in the other world,
and of the resurrection from the dead, do not marry, for they are no
longer subject to death. They are like angels; they are children of God,
because they share in the resurrection.” And so Jesus gives them an
answer…the resurrection is not just “life as usual” after you die but
something different…the old rules don’t apply anymore, so your question
doesn’t make sense…and then Jesus says something which I think this is
really startling,…:”That the dead are raised to life again is shown by
Moses himself in the story of the burning bush, when he calls the Lord,
‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob’. At the end of
explaining of how the resurrection of the dead is not “life as usual,”
Jesus uses the following little argument with the Sadducees to make his
point…he says to them, “Do you remember when Moses was at the
burning bush, whenever God was trying to convince Moses to lead Israel
out of Egypt, and God identified God’s self by saying ‘I am the God of
Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob’? Jesus wants them to
notice that God did NOT say “I WAS the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, the God of Jacob.” There is no past tense…there is only the
present tense. No, instead God said “I AM the God of Abraham, of
Isaac, of Jacob.” And then in the next line, he puts the final touch on his
neat little argument—“God is not God of the dead but of the living; in
God’s sight all are alive.”
Remember, when I mentioned earlier, that Jesus doesn’t really concern
himself much with the afterlife? Well, here he does it again…he gets a
pretty clear chance to give ust he lowdown on exactly what happens and
all we get is a few lines about what the resurrection is NOT like. And
while we’re sitting with the Sadducees a little frustrated because we don’t
have the answers we want about what happens when we die, at this
beautiful, exasperating moment, Jesus point us back to life. “God is not
God of the dead but of the living; in God’s sight all are alive.” When God
looks out onto the world of humans, God doesn’t see life and death, like
we do—instead God SEES LIFE. All around, God sees life. This thing
called the resurrection of the body in the Christian tradition is not about
death, but about life. The resurrection is a powerful affirmation that
Christianity is rooted in life. And whenever we do become resurrected,
whenever that happens and in whatever form that takes place, we will
recognize ourselves as being alive, just as God always sees us as being
alive. Yes, it will be a different form of life, as Jesus point out here, but it
will be something we recognize as life. I think one of the reasons that
Jesus moves us on beyond speculation about the afterlife is that it doesn’
t concern him that much, and it has never really concerned the Christian
faith that much.
Yes, we have the doctrine of the resurrection, but the Biblical writers don’
t concern themselves much on the details. And as we can see, when
Jesus is given a chance to explain exactly what happens after death, he
passes on the chance. He gives us clues about what its NOT like but
doesn’t offer much details. But at the end of this argument about the
resurrection, he point us to life, and to a life that we will recognize as
life. You know, over the years I’ve thought about how I would try to
answer my friend Phil’s understanding of what Christianity means. And I
think I would now try to answer him with something like this :You know, if
your looking for a religion that tries to answer in detail what happens to
you when you die,Christianity is not that religion. Christ did not focus on
that issue because he knew that it was ENOUGH to live in THIS world,
with all of its complexity and its challenges, and with all of its beauty and
joy. The next life we will have is a continuation of a story we are writing
right now, and that’s where Jesus wants us to focus our lives on. Not on
the next chapter, but on the story that’s being written now. We will go
forward into life, but Christ is not concerned so much with the afterlife as
he is with this life. Following Christ is not to be obsessed with the life to
come, but with the life that is present. To follow this Christ is to be
rooted in life, because Christianity is a life-based faith—“God is not God
of the dead but of the living; in God’s sight all are alive.” Isn’t that what
the resurrection is all about, both Christ’s resurrection and our imminent
resurrections?! “HE’S ALIVE!” the women tell the disciples frantically at
the tomb. And one day those words will ring in our ears as well. We are
writing the story of our lives into eternity, but the writing starts now, at
this moment, in this life. AMEN.
