Saturday, November 19, 2022

19 November 2022 - God of the living


Some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection,
came forward and put this question to Jesus

There are many today who deny the possibility of a resurrection because to affirm it would in their minds imply various absurdities. This was the sort of argument made by the Sadducees as well. Thus the tragedies of this fictitious women's life seemed to argue against the possibility of the resurrection. She had been married to each brother in turn, always exclusively given to one alone. But  at the resurrection how could this be honored and restored? How could she be uniquely in a relationship with each brother? And if in the resurrection she was given only to one (perhaps the first or the most recent?) how was that fair to the others and how were they to bear it? Given the strong stance of God against the practice of polygamy there didn't seem to be a viable option to the critique of the Sadducees. 

Finally the woman also died.
Now at the resurrection whose wife will that woman be?
For all seven had been married to her.

The error of the Sadducees is the same error that is shared by many who deny the possibility of the resurrection in modern times. It is an assumption that the present age and the age to come must be identical. The Sadducees for their part could not see beyond the explicit teachings of the Torah. Our modern skeptics are often limited by their perspectives, such as materialism and scientism. Things which don't fit into the framework, or which would result in absurdity within a narrow band of understanding, are discarded. What would be preferable is for such perspectives to recognize their inherent limitations, to be able to open outward, to not insist that they are the exclusive basis for understanding the world, and therefore be open to possibilities that they can't contain or describe. It is not the business of science to explain away miracles or to discover regular laws that can predict them. Yet it also is not the place of science to disclaim or deny the very possibility of miracles. Such declarations are inherently not scientific. 

The resurrection of the body is not only a particular instance of a miracle, it is associated with the age to come when many of the assumptions that mark the present age will no longer be valid. Did the Torah explicitly describe this? No, but, as we will see, it was implied. Does science in fact predict anything like it? No, but by the very contingency of created things there is implied to be an ever greater freedom of the creator himself over his creation.

Jesus said to them,
“The children of this age marry and remarry;
but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age
and to the resurrection of the dead
neither marry nor are given in marriage.

Jesus did not say that those married in this age would have no relationship with their spouse in the age to come. What he did say was that the premise of marriage in this present age was ordered toward the procreation of the species after a fashion that would no longer be necessary once everyone became "like angels" insofar as they could "no longer die". The primary relationship that would define those worthy of the age to come was that they were children of God in a way that was no longer expressed through the symbolic mediation of earthly realities (such as how marriage was a symbol of God's covenant relationship with his Church). Yet there would doubtlessly also be a way that the age to come would make good and bring to fullness the marriages of this present age. It would be a way that could only be understood on the terms of the new realities of that age, not merely by the exigencies of our own. The absurdities suggested by the Sadducees would vanish if they were able glimpse the way that, in the age to come, God would be all in all (see First Corinthians 15:28). The age to come would not contain marriage as it was narrowly understood in this present age. But for those married in this age it would doubtlessly contain something better.

That the dead will rise
even Moses made known in the passage about the bush,
when he called  ‘Lord’
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob;
and he is not God of the dead, but of the living,
for to him all are alive.

When we try to confine God to our particular moment in time, or limit him to our own point of view or presuppositions, we do not adequately imagine God. We are for the most part limited by this particular point in our linear progression down the timeline of temporal reality. But God is present at every point in that timeline. Indeed, he sustains it by his powerful word (see Hebrews 1:3). His relationships with creatures whom he has destined for immortality is not limited in the way that time and death limit our own relationships. This very fact, this very presence before him of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all of the just, along with his love for the goodness of creation, all but implies the resurrection. Indeed, the resurrection itself is something God can already behold, the place where he lives together with all of those who trusted him in their lives in this age. It is his very beholding it, rather than, say, the laws of science, that is the ultimate source of its reality. This perspective shift, from our own limited viewpoints, to humility before the God of the living is that to which Jesus called the Sadducees and calls us now as well. Once we recognize that he is the God of the living we begin to also realize the truth of what was had seemed previously to be only a pious expression, that with him all things are possible. And then our own doubts are silenced.

Some of the scribes said in reply,
“Teacher, you have answered well.”
And they no longer dared to ask him anything.

Once we learn to place our perspectives in second place to God's perspective we can become witnesses, sources of the oil of gladness like olive trees, and lights for the world like lampstands. We can give powerful testimony for the sake of a reality that transcends the limits of the physical and temporal world we see around us, over all of which God reigns as sovereign king.






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