God
of the Living
(Luke
20.27-40)
In one of his books, the great theologian, Jürgen
Moltmann, tells the story of his experience with some poor Christian
communities in Latin America. From time to time, as part of their worship, Moltmann
reports, there is a roll call of people from the community who have been killed
in political violence, or martyred for their faith, or have just disappeared,
their fate unknown. As the names are read out, the whole congregation calls out
‘Presente!’[1] Present.
I find that moving. Here is a determination not to
forget; not to have the vibrant lives of others thrown irrevocably into the
past. ‘Presente!’ But here also is a theological challenge. How do we honour our connection with the dead? How do we express our relation with
people whom we have loved, and whose love has deeply influenced us, but who are
now gone?
Today in the church calendar is All Saints and All Souls Day.
Well, the actual days fell on November 1st and 2nd, last
Monday and Tuesday. But today is the first Sunday
after on which these feasts are celebrated together. These special days are set
aside in the Church to remember the dead who yet belong to our life and
communion. And this is important, I think. For this reason. We Christians do
not narrate death in the same way as the wider community in which we live. And
this difference is part of our specific witness to the world. The difference is
expressed in a nutshell in the story of the Latin American community that
cries, ‘presente!’ in a roll call of its martyrs.
This difference, too, lies near the heart of our
Gospel reading this morning. Jesus is confronted in the Temple by a group of
Sadducees who challenge his way of speaking
about death. Not a lot is known about this group. It seems they were largely
well to do; they put heavy emphasis on the first five books of the Hebrew Bible
as their theological authority; and—and this is the critical bit for our text
this morning—they rejected the idea of the resurrection of the dead. For the
Sadducees, life is life between birth and death. In dying our involvement with
life comes to a full stop. The dead are dead.
The Sadducees make their point in terms of a pretty silly
story designed to demonstrate that the idea of resurrection as self-contradictory.
They take off from the levirate law of marriage set out in Deuteronomy 25. To
prevent the extinction of a family name and the alienation of its property,
this law required that a man marry his brother’s widow if he died childless, in
order to raise up children to carry on the family line. But these Temple debaters
really push it. Not seven wives for seven brothers, but one wife—Lord help her—for
seven brothers, one after the other. And still no children. Then the trip
question: In the resurrection whose wife will she be? Since the same levirate law
dictates only one wife for one husband, if they are all resurrected it’s going
to be a matrimonial shemozzle. Obviously—so the argument intends—it’s
practically, legally and theologically simpler to narrate death as death and be
done with it.
Jesus doesn’t agree. On two grounds: (i) the power of
God, and (ii) the interpretation of scripture. The serial marriage story, which
is already a farfetched yarn if ever there was one, simply assumes that life in
the coming age, the age beyond death, is a replica of life in this age—same
rules, same relationships. But that is just not so, according to Jesus. That
misunderstands the capacity of God, through resurrection, to transform this earthy
existence into a new, trans-temporal, heavenly life on a different level and of
eternal quality in fellowship with God’s own eternal being.
Moreover—and this is the second point—it misinterprets
scripture. Jesus goes straight to the section of scripture that the Sadducees
themselves acknowledged as supremely authoritative, namely the person of Moses.
He appeals to the famous story of Moses’ encounter with God at the burning
bush. God calls to Moses from the bush and when Moses asks God for identity,
God replies: ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ (Exodus 3.6) Though Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are
long dead, yet God speaks to Moses about them in the present tense. ‘I am the
God of Abraham …’. ‘Presente!’ as it were. Then Jesus says to the Sadducees,
‘God is the God of the living not the dead’, ‘for to him [God] all of them are
alive.’ That is highly important for the way we Christians see and narrate
death. I can’t go into this is the detail it deserves. But I want to make a few
central points.
1. Jesus’ narration of death in this text says
to us, as it did to the Sadducees: ‘Death
is not God.’ Sometimes in our culture—and this was also true in Jesus’
time—death is credited with at least some of the qualities that we normally
ascribe to God. For example, (i) it is often assumed that death is the final word spoken. Beyond death there is
nothing more that is said or is to be said to us. The Sadducees held this
position. So do many in our society.
And (ii) death is seen as an absolutely inescapable
power. It holds sway in reality as nothing else does. Plants, animals,
humans, even the earth and solar system, and maybe even the whole universe,
will eventually fall into its all embracing dominance. In the end death rules
supreme. And (iii) its rule is an eternal
rule. To enter death is to enter a perpetual and unchanging state of
nothingness, from which there is no return. Jesus challenges all these readings of death’s power. God alone speaks the final word in this
world. God alone holds absolute sway
in the dynamics of being and non-being. God
alone is eternal and determines who shares in God’s eternity. As Paul put it,
‘We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death not longer has dominion over him.’ (Rom
6.9). Death is not God. ‘Presente!’
2. The
second point of Jesus’ narration of death is that ‘God is not dead’. I don’t think the Sadducees would have disputed
this point. They weren’t atheists. They merely thought God gave life in this
world on a limited basis, between birth and death. But in our time, I think
this is an important point to make. Of course, not everyone outside the Church
has lost confidence in the reality of God. But we live in a time of some pretty
militant anti-theism. And where such views hold, a particular narration of
death follows. If God is dead, we die into nothingness. There is no sense in
any talk of resurrection. If God is dead, there can be no cry of ‘presente!’ in
relation to our dead, in any other sense than that they live on in our
memories. That is not unimportant, of course. But it is not what the story of resurrection entails. Death is not God. And
God is not dead. ‘Presente!’
3. The third
point Jesus’ makes I find strangely moving. ‘God is the God not of the dead,
but of the living; for to him all of them are alive,’ he says. Paul draws
exactly the same conclusion, not by reference to Moses’ encounter with God at
the burning bush, but as a response to the revelation of God given in Jesus himself. ‘For to this end,’ he writes, ‘Christ died
and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the living and the dead.’
(Romans 14.9). The Lordship of Christ is not bounded by the iron ring of death.
The dead are encompassed, that is held within, the living operation of Christ’s
rule in the world. The dead do not fall outside, but inside, Christ’s mercy,
love, redemption, and life. And the nearer we are drawn into the Lordship of
Christ, that is, the nearer we are drawn into loving fellowship with Christ in
the power of the Spirit, the nearer we are drawn into that kingdom of God which
includes both the living and the dead.
I think this
is what the writer of the book of Hebrews meant when, after that famous 11th
chapter in which he sets out a great list of all the saints, reaching back to
Cain and Abel, who have lived by faith in God and since died, goes on to say to
his community: ‘Therefore, since we
are surrounded by so great a cloud of
witness … let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking
to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.’ (Heb 12.1). He doesn’t just
mean that we are touched by the recollection
of these saints in our memories. He
means we are ‘surrounded’ by them in the sense that they are a part of the great
kingdom of Christ that includes the living and
the dead. ‘Presente!’
Death is not
God. God is not dead. And God is the God of the living not the dead. These are some
of the implications of Jesus’ debate with the Sadducees about narrating death
in terms of resurrection. But at the time of their encounter in the Temple, the
discussion had a sort of disembodied, theoretical quality to it: assertions
about the power of God to transform this earthly life into a heavenly glory; arguments
about important scriptural texts on the nature of God, and so on. But for Luke,
who reports this exchange in the Temple, and for us who read that report today,
a huge sea-change has occurred in the grounds on which our narration of death depends. I mean, of course, the resurrection
of Jesus from the dead. It is not just
that we believe death is not God in some general way. And it is not just that we believe that God is not
dead in some formal sense. And it is not just
that we believe that God is the God of the living and not the dead, because of
a text in Exodus. Though these things may be true enough. But for Luke, and for
us, between these arguments and our own lives stands the resurrection of Jesus.
That truth and the witness to it in the NT now truly grounds what we have to say in our narration of death
in our time.
According to
Luke—and in this he is in basic agreement with the entire witness of the NT—after
his death on the cross Jesus appeared to his disciples risen from the dead. And
then, says Luke concluding his Gospel, ‘Then he [the risen Jesus] opened their
minds to understand the scriptures … that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise
from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is
to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. [And]
You are witnesses of these things.’ (Luke 24.45-48].
Indeed we are.
Witnesses as this communion table. But witnesses who are surrounded by a great crowd
of witnesses who have gone before us; witnesses who are one with us in communion
in the risen Christ, who is Lord both of the living and the dead. ‘Presente!’
Graeme Garrett
Canberra Baptist Church
Twenty Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
7 November 2010