Resurrection and Dreams: 27th Week of Ordinary Time

Luke 20:27-38

The Sadducees were the political party of the priests. The only place where the Jewish people could worship God directly was in the Temple of Jerusalem. So the Temple was constantly streaming with pilgrims coming to make sacrifices and offerings for blessing, or forgiveness. It took a lot of priests to do the work of slaughtering all the animals to be sacrificed, and of interceding for all those pilgrims. But the Sadducees took their calling very seriously. And they followed the instructions for their priestly duties as laid out in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. For after all those three books, along with Genesis and Numbers, had been given to the people of Israel by Moses.

In fact, the Sadducees believed that only those first five books of the Old Testament were binding on the people of Israel. The prophets, the historical books, the books of wisdom, the Psalms – none of those had been given by Moses, and only Moses was authoritative for the Sadducees. And to the point of today’s Gospel reading, there isn’t anything in the first five books of the Old Testament that speaks directly of an afterlife. It is in the later books of the Old Testament, written much closer to the time of Jesus, that you begin to see an explicit affirmation that there is life after physical death. The Pharisees, on the other hand, did take all those other books to be authoritative. And as critical of them as Jesus could be, on this issue they were in agreement.

So, understand, the Sadducees sincerely believed that they had the scriptures on their side when they asserted that this life on earth was God’s one-time gift to you, and you had better use it right. All this is to explain why they were trying to trip Jesus up with their riddle of this one wife and the seven brothers she had to marry, one at a time, so whose wife will she be at the Resurrection, hmmm. But we can thank the Sadducees, for it gives Jesus an opportunity to peel back the veil and tell us something of the Resurrected life.

“Those worthy of being raised from the dead will not marry,” Jesus says, “because they are like angels, children of God and children of the Resurrection.” Particularly if you shared the Sadducees’ belief that there was no afterlife, the one hope of this world that you did have was your children. And they were not just your children. They were also the hope of your father, and his father, and his father before him , and so on back through the generations. “That which we have heard and known, and what our forefathers have told us, we will not hide from their children.” So, the author of Psalm 78 makes it clear that our children are not just ours, but also belong to the fathers and mothers who came before us.

But in the Resurrection, we will no longer have to place the burden of so many generations’ hopes on our children. Our bodies will no longer break down like old cars whose parts eventually wear out from too much use. Just as Jesus’ resurrected body was transformed, so shall ours. Old age shall no longer afflict us. But instead, we will have the fullness of mature youth restored to us. And we shall always be forever young, and will no longer need to pass on our genes to the next generation in the struggle to survive. Jesus has gone before us, through the veil of physical death, but now has a transphysical body, no less physical than our bodies but transformed. And as Jesus has passed through that veil, so shall we all.

There are many whom we love who have passed through that veil. But even for them the afterlife they now have is a time of waiting, just as we wait for that final Resurrection. Their souls have had to leave their bodies, for a time. But that is also true for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And as Jesus says, the Lord God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And contrary to that famous Time magazine cover from the 1960s, God isn’t dead. And if this living God continues to be alive to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, then they are alive to God. And so are all those faithful souls who stand before the throne of God, and praise God and pray to God for those whom they still love here in this world.

There are several faithful souls in this extended parish family who have gone to that throne since I came here nearly two years ago. I invite you to name them in our prayers later in this service, as well as all those whom we have lost in years past. To find healing from the pain of grief, we must take the time to give expression to our love of those who have died, and our sadness over their passing. Grief unexpressed merely finds expression in other ways. But at the same time, we must not let our grief so overwhelm us that we find ourselves in the same small box as the Sadducees’. Their box was the surface of this visible world. That was all they could see. They couldn’t see the spirit that gives this visible world life, and sometimes breaks through the surface with such beauty as to give us tears of joy and tenderness. Their box was lined with the literal words of the Books of Moses. And they couldn’t see the deeper meaning in God’s word to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.”

The Sadducees could only look back to the time of Moses, and they couldn’t dream of a better future. But imagine all the saints of God, up to the present day, standing before that throne in prayers and praises. Taste the bread and wine by which the Resurrected Jesus enters into our souls and bodies, and imagine that great reunion feast we will all share with the saints who have gone before us. And in that imagination, dream of how God might answer the prayers of the saints, and use us to bring out the true beauty of this world. And may the Resurrected Jesus give power to those dreams.