(Haggai 1:15b-2:9; Ps. 145:1-5, 18-22; 2 Thess. 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38)
“Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living.”
In the 1970’s, when I was in my mid-20’s, I began to discover an awareness of God’s presence in life, my own life and the life of the world around me. This wasn’t because I had any particular convictions that I wanted to see fulfilled, it was years before I started going back to church; but it seemed more and more apparent to me that just about any human situation, when you boiled it down far enough, was essentially a matter of where God was, or was not. Whether the people involved thought of it that way or not – and most certainly didn’t – God was either being loved, or not: ignored, denied, yelled at, misunderstood, run from screaming; or listened to, delighted in, joined with, learned from, followed. Again, whether the people involved thought of it that way or not, this was what I saw happening.
I was talking about all this at the time with two friends who were professional writers, very smart and good guys, and they put up with me – people don’t talk about God, and I’m sure that what I had to say was rambling and incoherent from me, but they listened; and finally one of them put up his hand and said, Look: God’s a good Monday-morning quarterback.
For those who may not be familiar with that euphemism, it means a second-guesser, someone who, after the fact and from the safety of the sidelines, tells you what you should have done differently.
If my friend really meant that about God, then of course it’s tragic that his understanding of God was so impoverished, so completely off. If, however, what he meant was that that’s the way people in general think about God, then he had a point. I think it’s indisputable that the picture of God as someone who spends all his time grading our performance is quite common; and we have to acknowledge that the church, over the centuries, bears a lot of responsibility for that terrible misconception.
And it is a misconception. God does not look back. God looks forward. The three readings today, each in its own way, all testify to this, they all look forward. The Old Testament reading from the prophet Haggai, writing near the end of the Babylonian exile, is a beautiful statement of hope, God telling the people to look forward, to the reestablishment of the temple in Jerusalem: Take courage, do not fear; my spirit abides among you. The reading from 2 Thessalonians looks forward to “the day of the Lord”, looks forward to a clearer understanding, by the grace of God, of what that means, what it’s going to look like.
The reading from the gospel of Luke looks forward as well, but not just in the way that would seem most apparent. The reading has to do with the resurrection, which is obviously looking forward, to the life after this one; but in this story we heard words from Jesus that involve something much larger, that’s easy to miss. Years ago, during this week of the lectionary schedule, there was a meeting of clergy in our western part of the diocese with Bishop Jim Curry, and at the beginning, as kind of an icebreaker, he invited each of us to name our favorite gospel story. One or two people chimed right in, and then there was a little pause, and someone said, “Not this week’s.” I think everybody there knew what he meant, today’s gospel seems like kind of an in-group story about a point of theology that doesn’t seem terribly relevant to this life, and the argument’s kind of hard to follow; but there’s certainly more here than that.
In this story Jesus is confronted by a group of Sadducees. In the Judaism of Jesus’ day there were two main subgroups, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Sadducees were a smaller number; they were the aristocrats, and the conservative party. They recognized as Holy Scripture only the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and they refused to believe any doctrine that was not authorized by those books. This therefore meant that they did not believe in a bodily resurrection after death – that idea was a development in Jewish thought that occurred at least 500 years after the Torah was written – and the Sadducees approach Jesus to test him on this issue, apparently either to trip him up like the Pharisees were always trying to do, or to convince him, to get him on their side.
To prove their case, they refer to a passage from Deuteronomy that has to do with marriage laws: if a woman’s husband dies and they have not had a son, the man’s brother is required to marry her and provide her with a son. This law existed for two reasons: it kept property within a family, because only males could inherit property; and it provided some measure of protection for women, who in that patriarchal society were economically powerless.
The Sadducees who come to Jesus to get him to weigh in on the resurrection have cooked up a hypothetical case in which a woman marries seven brothers in succession, because they each die, and each leaves her childless, and their question is, if there is a resurrection, in the next life, which one of the seven would be her husband? They evidently believe that this cockamamie story is a bulletproof argument on their side because it irrefutably demonstrates that belief in the resurrection is logically excluded by the law of Moses.
The whole idea reminds me of a famous story about St. Augustine, who was once asked by an atheist, What was God doing before he created the universe? And Augustine answered, He was busy creating hell, for people who ask stupid questions like that one.
It’s a stupid question because this is God we’re talking about, and it’s futile to expect God to behave according to our own expectations, to conform to our human notions of logic, to live by standards that we establish. Jesus makes essentially the same point with the Sadducees (although he does it with a good deal more patience than Augustine) when he says that we shouldn’t expect the life we live on earth and the life of the spirit to operate by the same rules. Jesus is telling the Sadducees that they’re wrong, that the resurrection is a reality.
But the point he comes down to, the principle on which he bases everything he’s been saying, is contained in the words he finishes with: God is not God of the dead, but of the living.
These words do not simply address the question of the resurrection. Jesus is saying something that has much bigger implications, something that affects all of our life, something about who God is. He’s saying that God cares about what’s going on now, with you and me; God is involved with what’s going on now, with you and me. That’s God’s work. It’s another way of what Jesus has said from the beginning: that the kingdom of God is among us.
In Christ, God is our friend on the way of life: our friend who loves us; who is always gently drawing us forward into that kingdom of love and peace and joy and justice; who is always inviting us to join in the creation of that kingdom in this world. This is not a Monday morning quarterback. This is God for us, God beside us, God within us: not the God of the dead, but God of the living. Thanks be to God.