Last week, when we celebrated All Saints Sunday, I talked about the
Communion of Saints, and I reminded us that we are included in that
Communion. We are saints, not because we are particularly good, or
heroic, or special in some other way, but simply because we believe in
Jesus Christ. Saints, in the biblical sense, are believers,
Christians; and with all those people who have died in the faith of
Christ over the last two thousand years or more, we are the Communion
of Saints.
Today our readings invite us to say a little bit more about this, and
particularly about what we usually call life after death. What can we
say about that? Well, as I probably said last week, we can say more
than we sometimes think, but a lot less than some Christians are
inclined to claim.
For instance, I'm always surprised how many longstanding members of
the Church harbour a secret belief in reincarnation. Never mind that
it is entirely inconsistent with most if not all of the biblical
teaching on the subject – inconsistent with the idea of eternal rest,
of resurrection, of redemption and all the rest. Never mind that
nobody has ever been able to explain the 'mechanics' of reincarnation;
how can I still be me if I am born again to different parents, with a
different gender perhaps, or even as a member of a different species?
How do I get from one incarnation to the next? Does it happen
immediately, and, if not, where am I between incarnations? Who
decides my next incarnation? The whole thing is, to put it very
mildly, problematic, and far less credible that the Christian teaching
on bodily resurrection. Yet, despite all that, our critics will laugh
to scorn our Easter story while insisting that we must take with
utmost seriousness and respect, the bizarre notion of reincarnation.
But I digress. Let's get back to what we can say about our
understanding of life after death. We start today with this
astonishing insight from the beleaguered Job. Conventional wisdom has
it that Jewish theology knew nothing of resurrection until very late
in the piece, about the middle of the second century BC. It's from
that period that we have the Book of Maccabees, in which the argument
is developed based on the justice of God. The orthodox view in the
Hebrew Scriptures was that terrible things only happened to sinful
people, while good things happened to righteous people.
The evidence for that, from both points of view, was always pretty
weak, and it came apart during the Jewish fight for independence under
the Maccabees. They were fighting a just war; they were following the
Torah; they refused to fight on the Sabbath and suffered the
consequences. How could this be? How could those on God's side be
killed by those who didn't believe in God? Was God powerless to save
his people? Was there no divine justice?
There certainly wasn't this side of the grave; therefore, if God is
just, there must be a sorting out after death – there must be a
judgment, a day of reckoning, when the good and the bad receive their
just deserts. From then on the idea of some form of personal survival
of death quickly gathered support, until by the time of Jesus, the
majority party, the Pharisees, believed in resurrection.
But this passage today reminds us that such a belief appeared, albeit
sporadically, much earlier on in Jewish teaching. And here we see
that it wasn't worked out in the clever mind of a deep thinker; it
struck Job as a gratuitous insight in the midst of his great anguish.
A whole succession of terrible things had befallen Job, a righteous
man with a deep faith in God.
His friends, of course, attributed it all to Job's secret and
unrepented sin; but Job protested his innocence. What, then – was God
acting towards him unjustly? Job couldn't bring himself to accept
that either. So what was the answer? As he wrestled with this
agonising issue, he suddenly had this breakthrough. He couldn't
explain it, but there were certain things he was absolutely sure of.
The first was that he had a Redeemer, someone who would buy his
freedom, someone who would save him. Someone who was living at the
time, and 'in the end' will stand upon the earth'. Although living
now he is not on the earth now. So where is he?
Secondly, Job is sure that after his own death ("after my skin has
been destroyed") he will, in his own flesh and with his own eyes, see
God! In other words, speaking under prophetic inspiration, Job
affirms his faith in the resurrection of the body! There is the first
instalment of the encouragement that we can offer to anyone today who
is going through the sort of personal hell Job was experiencing at the
time. This hell will end; and then one day you will see God with your
own eyes – and all will be well for ever.
In a way St Paul deals with the opposite problem in his Second Letter
to the Thessalonians. They believe in the resurrection of the dead;
in fact, they believe in the rapture of the living. They are not
suffering any great hardship – their only problem seems to be their
own impatience. They are ready to go now – they are waiting for Jesus
to return and collect them. Why is he taking so long? St Paul gives
a baffling answer that few if any scholars even pretend to understand;
but the gist is that we are called to go on living in the certainty of
Christ's return and the uncertainty of its timing. We are to be
prepared, to live each day in the belief that it could be the last
before we meet God face to face. When the Master returns, what will
he find his servants doing?
And so to the gospel reading. Once again, a group of his opponents
have some to Jesus in the hope of trapping him into saying something
that will upset either the Roman authorities or the devout Jews. The
opening skirmish about the requirement to pay taxes fizzles out, and
the Sadducees take the floor to have a go at him about life after
death. They draw his attention to the requirement of the Mosaic Law
that if a married man dies childless, his brother must marry the widow
and attempt to have children for him.
They go a bit overboard with the story, but the issue is clear: if two
or more men have married a woman, whose wife is she in the next world?
It sounds a difficult one to answer, but it is really no question at
all. They are assuming that resurrection means something like
restoration or reinstatement; as if life after death continues much as
it did before death. As I said last week, we only have to browse the
death notices and the In Memoriam columns in the ODT to see that many
people today are under the same misapprehension.
But, says, Jesus, in the age to come, life is not like that. There
will be no such thing as marriage, and no such thing as death. In
that respect we will be more like the angels than earthbound human
beings.
And then Jesus concludes this teaching with one of the greatest lines
in the whole of Scripture. He says that to God "all are living".
Think about that for a moment – let those words sink in. They are
words of the greatest possible comfort to all who have lost loved
ones. Have you lost a child? That child is alive to God. Have you
lost a spouse? Your spouse is alive to God. A brother, a sister,
parents? Every one of them is alive to God. That is the teaching of
our faith; and, as St Paul often said, we have that from the Lord
himself.
How are they alive to God? What does that mean? Where are they? We
don't know because it hasn't been revealed to us, and therefore we
cannot say. Such details shouldn't trouble us. All that matter is
that we have a Redeemer, that one day we will see God with our own
eyes, and that all our loved ones who have died are alive to God.
What more do we need?
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