Pentecost 25

Pentecost 25 (Luke 20:27-38)

“Now God is not the God of the dead but the living.”

God created human beings to enjoy life.

The life we can enjoy derives from God the Son who is life eternal.  Jesus came to restore to us what we pride fully rejected. In Jesus God reunites humanity and divinity.

In the marriage ceremony the priest declares: those whom God has joined together let no one separate. Marriage is the pre-eminent image of God’s relationship to humanity. In Adam humanity has chosen separation from God. In Jesus God replies: therefore, what God has joined together let no one separate.

The Sadducees were well aware of the Biblical teaching on marriage. They used the teaching to challenge Jesus rather than to understand Jesus. The Sadducees considered themselves to be strict conservatives. They only accepted the first five books of the Bible to be authoritative. They focused exclusively on the Law as the means by which they could count themselves righteous and lay a claim to Divine favor in this life.

The Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife of any sort. As with most people of the ancient world they believed dead was dead. They believed the spirit was quite literally in the breath. When you breathed your last breath your body died and your spirit expired.  The Sadducees ridiculed the Pharisees for believing in the resurrection. It seemed ludicrous to the Sadducees that God would somehow recreate a long dead body and breathe the breath of life back into it.

To emphasize their point, they challenged Jesus from the place an absurd scenario. According to the Law of Moses, if a man died without children it was the responsibility of his brother to marry the widow and have children to preserve the dead brother’s name and memory.

The scenario postulates this process continuing through the death of seven brothers until they and finally the wife die. The question then becomes: if they are resurrected then who is the real husband?

The Sadducees as well as other religious sects took a perverse pleasure in this line of questioning. They devised the most improbable scenarios and the most absurd interpretations to discredit beliefs they rejected.

Jesus handled this situation with great skill and compassion. He uses the challenge as an occasion for instruction.

Jesus teaches that the resurrection body is a physical body but a physical body raised to perfection to live in a new set of relationships. Very specifically, he assures the Sadducees that the resurrection of the body is real. But, he corrects their misunderstanding of what resurrection is. The resurrection body is a new body for a new world. It is no longer subject to the distortions of separation, sin and death. In the resurrection people live in union with God, each other, and the image of God imprinted on their souls.  It is a new life and a new way of living for a new set of relationships that brings to fulfillment and perfection the old life and the old set of relationships.

Very specifically, in terms of marriage, the spiritual promise of marriage in the soul’s union with God is made real and made complete. The old form of marriage ends with physical death. The new life of the resurrection transforms the exclusive marriage relationship on earth to an inclusive and transcendent set of relationships.

Jesus compares this new life to the life of the angels who neither marry or are given in marriage yet enjoy both particular and universal relationships with each other, with human beings and with God.

Jesus summarizes his teaching with the assurance to those who believe dead is dead that God is life eternal. In God all live. Physical death is the tragic consequence of Original Separation. Eternal life is the great gift of God in the reunion of humanity with divinity in Jesus Christ. The Pharisees taught that an afterlife was a reward for those few who kept the Law by keeping themselves separate from lesser men. The Sadducees taught that the reward for righteousness comes only in this life.

Jesus teaches that life emerges from a series of relationships. The primary life giving relationship is our relationship with God. The secondary life giving relationship is our relationships with other people. The third life giving relationship is our relationship with the image and likeness of God imprinted on our souls- our true and unique personal identity.

Life derives from relationships. Broken relationships diminish our lives and facilitate the process of Original Separation that leads to death. The restoration of our broken relationship with God in the union of divinity and humanity in Jesus reconnects us with the Original Blessing of eternal life.

Jesus restored human nature to life in the incarnation. He took away sin on the cross. He transformed death back into life by his resurrection. He did it all for us and offers it all to us. What he offers in these amazing gifts is a new life that can, if we choose to follow the path, produce a new way of living.  That new way of living is active, dynamic, spontaneous, creative, filled with infinite possibilities and formed by the unifying principle of eternal love. This is possible and this is real because Jesus just doesn’t have life. He is the very source and pattern of life. He reassured the Sadducees and he reassures us: “Now God is not the God of the dead but the living.”