Better Than You Imagine

Proper 27C: Luke 20:27-40

William Willimon, former chaplain at Duke University, tells about the time Carlyle Marney came to his campus. A student asked, "Dr. Marney, would you say a word or two about the resurrection of the dead?" Marney replied, "I will not discuss that with people like you." "Why not?" asked the student. "I don't discuss such matters with anyone under 30." Marney explained, "Look at you, in the prime of life, potent - never have you known honest-to-God failure, betrayal, impotency, solid defeat, brick walls, mortality. So what can you know of a dark world which only makes sense if Christ is raised?” As Dr. Marney suggests, there are questions that ought not to be asked except by those who are desperate for an answer.

This point is especially pertinent to this morning’s Gospel lesson. For when some Jewish temple leaders known as Sadducees ask Jesus about the resurrection, they are not really hungry for an answer. They aren’t even looking to satisfy their casual curiosity. They’re hoping to trap Jesus, to stump him with a question about an extreme, hypothetical situation.

This is why this passage is so unsatisfying, why Jesus' response is less than enlightening. What else can he give them? There is no right answer to a wrong question. As Karl Barth said of Scripture itself, “The Bible gives to every [person] and to every era such answers to their questions as they deserve. We shall always find in it as much as we seek and no more.”

It’s telling, I think, that when others asked Jesus about the resurrection, his responses were more illuminating. When Martha was groping her way to a brave faith at her brother's tomb, for example, Jesus said, "I am the resurrection." When Mary Magdalene was blinded with tears outside Jesus’ tomb, he gave the answer of her own name spoken from the other side of death. Pose the question with tears under the shadow of death, and you may hear a consoling word. Pose it in the safe, secure confines of the temple, where you are in charge, though, and the answer you get may leave you scratching your head.

That said, Jesus did give an answer to the Sadducees, and that in itself is a startling grace. His answer effectively kills their question, but it's a mercy killing. The Sadducees posed their question in terms of an imaginary woman who’s married to a succession of seven short-lived brothers, all of whom try valiantly but unsuccessfully to get a son by her. Then the woman dies. So tell us, they demand, Mr. Religious Expert, who gets her at the so-called ‘resurrection of the dead’? Its’s a mocking question. Apparently, they think this is funny, putting this puzzle, this Gordian knot before Jesus to untie.

The term “gordian knot,” if you didn’t know, comes from a legend surrounding Alexander the Great. King Gordius tied a knot so complex that it was believed impossible to untie—and if anyone did, prophesy had it that they would rule Asia. Alexander tried but couldn’t untie the knot, so he took out his sword and sliced right through it. In a similar way, Jesus doesn’t try to solve the Sadducees’ puzzle but cuts right through it instead.

He ignores the crazy scenario the Sadducees pose to him and tells them directly that they are utterly mistaken about the resurrection…and pretty much everything else. He explains that marriage and the other cultural and relational structures of "this age" won’t be needed in "that age," the age to come. Marriage makes sense now, indeed it is a good thing in the world as it is. But in the world to come, the world God is making, it will be obsolete, no longer needed.

We might excuse the Sadducees for not immediately grasping this, for not understanding the place of the resurrection in the world to come, how different it will be. Because when we think of our future, we too tend to think of it on the basis of how things are now. What happened yesterday will happen tomorrow. But then the Sadducees weren’t simply assuming the future will be the same as the present, were they? They were trying to argue against that future, to prove that the resurrection of the dead is absurd, that it doesn’t make sense given the way the world works.

But that’s just it, the resurrection isn’t supposed to make sense in this world, within the framework of how we understand things work. The age to come won’t be the same as it is now. It’ll be something very different. So it’s not that the resurrection is absurd. It’s that the Sadducees are being absurd for thinking they can squeeze it into the narrow parameters of the world as they know it.

The fact they tried to use marriage, of all things, to discredit the resurrection only shows how little they understood. You see, in this age, the age of death, the focus is on having children, because it is through them, the Sadducees believed, we have a sort of eternal life. We live on in our children. But for "those who are considered worthy of a place in that age,” the focus, Jesus says, isn’t on having children, but on being children, "children of God . . . children of the resurrection." In that age where all who trust in Jesus are children of God, there is no need for having children or being married. The having of people, one by the other, will be finished. All believers, and all their relationships will be changed, transfigured. Transfigured into what? If Jesus knows, he isn't saying. Only that this transfigured life will be like that of the angels, he says, never dying but always present to God.

Such a world s so amazing and so different from what Sadducees knew, that it was unfathomable. They didn’t understand it. And neither do most of us, if we are honest. I mean, when we think of the resurrection of the dead, we typically think of “going to heaven when we die,” to a place where things are like they are in this life, only sunnier, and the good things go on forever. That view is a gross trivialization of the significance of the resurrection. The resurrection of the dead can’t be reduced to a statement about individual immortality. The resurrection is rather a cosmic reversal, a world-shattering, cataclysmic event, the creation of a new world, a new order. For far too long the world has been in the grip of death. For too long death has called the shots, tried to be the last word on everything. For too long death has ruled the world through fear, violence, hatred, and lies. The resurrection is God's great announcement that that age has come to an end. It means death no longer rules. It means God finally gets what God wants, which is, as Jesus says, to be with us and be with us eternally.

No wonder the Sadducees couldn’t accept this. It sounds utterly crazy. An end to death and suffering? I recognize it’s crazy saying it to you now. It almost seems too good to be true, something so farfetched, that no one would believe it. And likely we wouldn’t, had it not been for Jesus, who is himself the “first fruits” of the resurrection, the forerunner of the transfigured life we will have in the age to come. In him, we see a glimpse what we will become.

What this means, though, is that in discussing the resurrection, we are talking about a future that hasn’t arrived, a reality that can’t be seen, a state of affairs that cannot be proven. It has to be taken on faith. It requires an ability to see beyond what is right in front of us. Which is not something everyone is able to do.

I heard a story; it might be apocryphal but may well be true. Two people, both clergy, both very well known in the American church, were speaking together. One of them is a prolific writer of skeptical books calling orthodox faith into question. The other is a famous preacher of the gospel. The skeptic, seeking to provoke the preacher, says, “My daughter has two Ph.D.’s. How can I expect her to believe anything so unacceptable to the modern mind as the resurrection of the body?” The preacher replied thoughtfully, “I don’t know your daughter. How great is her imagination?” In a way, objections to the resurrection have as much to do with a lack of imagination, as a lack of faith—the inability to conceive how powerful God is!

Still, for all that Jesus’ exchange with the Sadducees has to teach us about the nature of the age to come, it would be wrong to conclude from it that cherished intimacies on earth, our relationships with the ones we love, will be discontinued in the resurrection. There’s no warrant for that in Jesus’ words. And we can’t forget who Jesus was addressing: the Good Ole Boys, the ones in charge, men who were secure in their position and power, imagining some poor woman who was passed around from brother to brother. What if this hypothetical woman was instead a real woman, and what if she took the risk one day of asking Jesus, "Lord, of the seven, it was Eli I loved; will we be together in the resurrection?" Or maybe she’d say, "Lord, they all treated me awful; will I be free of them in the resurrection?" Or perhaps her concern would be, "Lord, I loved all seven like crazy; can I have 'em all in eternity?" Who’s to say by what word or gesture Jesus might answer, assuring her on all counts, "Yes, better than you imagine, dear daughter."

Of course, we don't know. We are left in a brilliant ignorance: "It does not yet appear what we shall be," St. John says in his letter. “But we will all be changed," St. Paul assures the Corinthians. Our earthly bodies are, he says, like seeds to our resurrected bodies. But what we will “grow” into is unstated. This, after all, is Jesus' point: whatever the resurrection is, it is utterly other than what we have known, and its center will be the One we have always known, however dimly. All that is contingent, say—the cultural, political and familial—that will fall away in the great “discontinuity” of resurrection. But what is real, what is enduring, will be lifted into light, as all relationships and all faces are transfigured for the children of God, and we are made utterly and finally alive.

Jesus makes this clear in his final point to the Sadducees. Harkening back to the story of the Moses at the burning bush, Jesus reminds them that God revealed himself as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” God didn’t say God was the God of the Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God said he is their God, the "God not of the dead, but of the living." The simple use of the present tense nature of God’s identity reveals something to us about human existence: The power that raised Jesus from the dead—and will raise us up in the last days of this age—is already alive in us. Just as the resurrection is a present-tense reality for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it is a present-tense reality for us as well. As God’s children, we are always alive to God.

That is why the resurrection, as crazy as it seems, is not just about what God will do in the future, but what God is doing right now. It’s not just some pie-in-the-sky hope, something we look forward to “someday.” It has real consequences for the here and now. For, people who believe that God is in fact bringing forth this new age, this new world, and who believe that they will be part of it, are people who are ready to work for God in the present time, who are eager to see God’s promises of righteousness, peace, and a new life begin to take effect in today’s world. Indeed, as we celebrate Christ’s resurrection from the dead—in our prayers and in our politics, in Bible study and in service of others—we will find God’s new order come to birth in our lives and through us in God’s suffering world. And for that we say, Thanks be to God!