Day 335 - The God of the Living

A sermon delivered Nov. 10, 2013 at first Presbyterian Church, Soddy Daisy, TN
OT Reading: Job 19: 23-27  *
NT reading: Luke 20: 27-38

The resurrection. It reminds me of the favorite old hymns, such as, “In that Great Getting up morning, fare thee well, fare thee well, ’ll be dressed in robes so white, singin’ I’ve been redeemed…” or, “When we all get to heaven what a day of rejoicing that will be…we all see Jesus we will sing the victory…” but in this exchange about the resurrection, Jesus talks about the God of the living, not The God of the dead…What is his point?

By now, the religious leaders were entirely fed up with Jesus. Since Jesus set his eyes on Jerusalem and left Galilee on his journey to the cross he has caused uproar and trouble. He called himself the Son of Man and the people hail him as God’s Messiah.  The confrontations on this trip are a real-life education on the foundation of discipleship, resisting temptation, finding and giving forgiveness, faith and duty, and the Kingdom of God.

If you entertain the idea that Christian discipleship is a bed of roses, the hard teachings on this journey pop that bubble.  Jesus describes a hard and challenging road like he walks. There will be conflict within families and trying times choosing loyalty to faith over loyalty to the world.  He says always be on guard against stumbling because we will meet temptation and stumble.  He warns us not to cause the little ones to stumble, else we put a millstone around our neck. At these words, the disciples can only plead fearfully, “increase our faith.”

If you still think the life of the Christian disciple is easy street, he tells us the story of the servants and the master. If we expect a reward in the here and now for faithful living, we are in for a surprise.  Jesus asks, “should the servant expect the master to fix and serve him dinner as a reward for doing what a servant’s duty requires?”  We should ask who is our Lord and Master? Jesus said, “when you have done all that the master ordered you to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’” In other words, do the right thing, because for the person of faith it is the right thing to do.

On faith, he encounters the poor Samaritan leper, the lowly outcast who is barred from the temple and by implication, from God. He is the only one of ten that realizes he was healed in God’s presence and comes back to worship. Jesus says, “your faith has saved you.”

If we continue to wonder when will we reap our due blessing for being faithful, Jesus uses the persistent widow and unjust judge to tell us to pray persistently, without ceasing, for the return of the Son of Man. That is when you will find your blessing.  But Jesus wonders, “Will the Son of Man find faith on earth when the Son of Man returns?”

He asks this because he understands the pride of the Pharisee and humility of the tax collector and Zachaeus, the chief Tax Collector. Jesus presents us a choice to go “all in” or walk away.  “All in” doesn’t mean giving up all your possessions, though you must remember all your gifts belong to God. “All in” means putting your entire faith in the Son of Man and working ceaselessly for the kingdom of God.  “All in” means following your vocation - God’s calling for your life.

Some commentators describe this journey to Jerusalem told by Luke as a spiral slowly spinning around Jerusalem in an ever-tightening radius until we are face to face with the cross. 

Jesus has entered Jerusalem; now everything is “all in.” Jesus makes no pretense about who he is. In a rage, he rids the temple of its moneychangers, calling the Temple his Father’s house. The Sadducees, the chief priests, the scribes and all the leaders of the people have had enough at this point and begin looking for ways to kill Jesus.

They try to trap him with three questions. Jesus humiliates and infuriates them with his replies. The first question: “By what authority are you doing these things?” He replies, “Did the baptism of John come from Heaven or humans?” If they answer “Heaven” they affirm the claim Jesus is the Son of God; and if they reply “man,” they alienate the people who believe John was a prophet sent by God. They can only answer, “We do not know.”

Then they try a second question to cast Jesus as a rebel against Rome, “Should we pay taxes to the emperor?” Jesus asks for a coin with the emperor’s likeness on it and says give the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and give to God the things that belong to God.

Exasperated and angry, they ask this third question about the resurrection based on the example of the levirate marriage.  If a man dies before leaving a male heir, the next of kin is to marry his wife and provide an heir. The Sadducees supposed the kinsman dies before producing an heir and the same event repeats until all brothers have married her and died without leaving an heir. When the woman dies if she is resurrected who of the seven is her husband? (What do you think?)

The answer is none of them, but we must understand the Sadducees to appreciate the answer. They were the aristocratic, priestly class that comprised part of the elite of Hebrew society. The Babylonians assimilated the richest part of captive societies because this is how they ensured success of their own society.  When the Sadducees returned to Jerusalem they took over the temple leadership.

The Sadducees were extremely conservative on religion. They deny the status of scripture to all non-Mosaic writings, including the scrolls of the prophets and the writings (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs and Psalms). They recognized only the Pentateuch, the first five books attributed to Moses.

They maintain nothing in those five books supports a personal afterlife or resurrection. For them, it is simple, if you live under the Law as a righteous person God will protect you while they live. Only the family name and memory of your righteousness (or not) lives on.

This religious belief and the fact men inherited everything in thepatrilineal society of the Pentateuch made the role of descendants a major issue. The most important thing for a wife was to give the husband a male heir to perpetuate the family name. This is the reason for the obligation of the nearest male relative, typically a brother, to marry the wife who had no male offspring. In its most negative sense levirate marriage viewed the wife as property or at least as person without independent property rights to perpetuate the family name. In its most positive sense, the levirate marriage ensured the welfare of the wife through the security of marriage. But that security might be illusory. You can imagine in some cases a close relative may not want to marry the wife. You can read the story of Naomi, Ruth and Boaz to it learn about that.

The Sadducees thought levirate marriage reduced the idea of resurrection to ridiculous on its face based on their rigid view of scripture. Their question intends to make a shamble of the whole idea of resurrection because it contradicts their literal understanding of the Pentateuch.

The Pharisees, on the other hand, took great interest in the question. They and other Jews recognized the writings of wisdom and the prophets as scripture and  believed in a resurrection and took Job’s comment seriously. (a point of trivia: The constitution of the Jewish Bible was not settled until about 4 centuries into the Christian era.)

Jesus turned the Pentateuch against the Sadducees. He quotes Exodus 3:6, God says God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; therefore, God is saying they are alive, hence there is a resurrection and God is the God of the living not the dead.

Jesus denies the whole question because there is no marriage in Heaven. But he didn’t make it easy to understand what happens in our resurrection. He will say to the thief on the cross, “Today you shall be with me in Paradise,” but what is Paradise? In the Gospel of John, He says he is going to his Father’s house to prepare a room for us, and whoever believes in Him has eternal life.

But Jesus never really makes it any clearer than here in Luke 20:34-38, “³⁴Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; ³⁵but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. ³⁶Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. “³⁸Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”

It leaves us with the idea our physical bodies are not there any more.  Paul tried to answer this question for the Corinthians in 1 Cor 15, with the idea of a spiritual body and a physical body.  

Paul was a Jew of the Diaspora, a Greek Jew. Greek philosophy, especially the part called Gnosticism was very influential in shaping Paul’s understanding of the body and afterlife and for that matter most of Western thought today.

We have grown up hearing about body and spirit from the earliest age so it all sounds natural.  There is a physical body that dies, and a soul or spirit that persists. Taken to its unhealthy extreme, this idea says the body is something bad because it is susceptible to the forces of an evil anti-god struggling with God. Our bodies are locked in that struggle between God and this anti-god hoping for the freedom of the spirit. This extreme view, besides being polytheistic, denies the importance of all the teachings of Jesus and preaching of Paul about human compassion and the focus on fellowship and the life here and now.  Paul would never go further than to say we have a physical and spiritual body.

In 1 Cor 15:35-44 Paul says … “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?”...There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another…So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable…It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.

Paul and Jesus are on the same page. Jesus tells the Sadducees marriage is a perishable physical relationship. In the resurrection there is no concern about living and dying because we are alive as children of God, like angels. One of my favorite hymns captures this idea. It is Isaac Watts’ paraphrase of the 23^rd psalm “My Shepherd will supply my need.”  The last stanza says, “then we will find a settled rest, no more a stranger or a guest, but like a child at home” as as I add, at play before the Father’s feet.

Jesus says the Sadducees do not open their minds to the reality of God but cling to mortal ideas of God. It is a trap we all fall into when we think of the resurrection in worldly terms of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and sons and daughters. It is a fact of our mortality that we are tied to this earthly body, it is natural and hard to avoid. When we think about immense happiness of Heaven we often turn to our emotional connections to family and close friends. Jesus says when we think about the happiness of resurrection, we should think about our relationship with God not with the world.

All we know is that resurrection is a glorious new life without end and with no worldly things that decay. In some mysterious way, we become a part of God.

If any one offers you an explanation of resurrection that goes beyond,  “We continue to live in a relationship as a child of God according to God’s purpose,” please realize you are listening to an opinion not a fact. Our bodily existence will end. We will live on but we do not know how because we cannot know the mind of God.

We do know from the time we spent on this road from Galilee to Jerusalem that how we use this physical body is very important to our future well-being. Jesus left us many instructions for living this physical life.

At the beginning of his gospel (1:1-4) Luke says his objective is to record an orderly and accurate account of things passed on by eye-witnesses and servants of the word that we may know the truth.

He relies heavily on the Gospel of Mark.  In the confrontation with the chief priests and leaders of the temple Mark (12:28-34) describes a final fourth question following the one on resurrection. Luke moves it to the very beginning of this journey as he leaves Galilee (10:25-28). It makes sense that Luke did it because the question and answer puts this entire journey and resurrection into proper perspective.

This is the question. A  lawyer, perhaps a Pharisee, asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus asks him, “What does the Law say?” The lawyer replies, “Love the Lord with all your body, soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus congratulates him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

And so here a Pharisee’s question at the beginning of the journey to the cross encapsulates the entire path to the Kingdom of God. Our resurrection as a child of God depends only on these two commandments.

I’ve decided I’m not going to worry or lose sleep over what it is going to happen in the resurrection, how or if I will react on seeing my mother and father, my grandparents and good friends. I encourage you to try to do the things I try to do, keep your eye on the prize, remember that God is the God of the living not the dead, and all the lessons on this journey from Galilee to Jerusalem about living, especially those two commandments. They sound easy but Jesus says we will stumble because striving to be a child of God is hard work. As Paul puts it, train hard and run the race the best you can. In that “Great Getting Up Morning” the faithful will understand the mystery when the question no longer matters.

God has a wonderful sense of humor about faith, doesn’t he? He must completely love us and expect us to do the same.

* note: all scripture comes from the Oremus bible Browser (www.bible.oremus.org), an NRSV text.