Today's gospel lesson reminds us that we are still in the realm of All Saints Day and our Feast of Lights evensong which we celebrated last Sunday. It’s a time in the liturgical calendar when we honor the communion of saints including those departed from this life, those among us and those yet to come. Today the focus is on resurrection and life.
God is God not of the dead, but of the living…” Luke’s gospel tells us. This is one of the most ancient claims about God made by our Jewish siblings. The ancient Hebrew moniker for God, Elohim Chayim, means “living God” or “God of life.” Here in Luke, chapter 20, Jesus drives home that idea.
But wait a second: Don’t we as Christians believe that when our mortal bodies die, that is the gateway to life with God? Don’t we in our Eucharistic prayer at funerals recall “for to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens”?
So, what could Jesus possibly mean?
The first thing that Jesus does is give a gentle grammatical correction: it isn’t enough to say that God is alive or the God of the living; rather, God is life. It is from God that all life flows forth. And in returning to God, all life finds its ultimate fulfillment. We do not live in some kind of finite system created by God a long, long time ago, then left mostly to run its course; rather, we live in God’s universe which is constantly being energized with the ebb and flow of life.
Jesus is, thankfully, making a teachable moment out of a ridiculous question. It’s ridiculous because the Sadducees, as Luke says, didn’t believe in the resurrection in the first place. They don’t believe there is anything after descent into the Land of the Dead. They aren’t seeking wisdom or instruction from Jesus. They don’t care about the woman or the resurrection. They care about shaming and exposing Jesus to gain an advantage over him. It’s not even an issue at that time:
Leverite marriage as this was called when a surviving brother was required to marry his deceased brother’s widow, was no longer practiced in Jesus’ time. Death, however, was omnipresent. Infant mortality was high and life expectancy was about 35 years. For much of human history, death was an agonizing ordeal. As Jesus was dying on the cross, he was offered wine mixed with myrrh, an herbal pain reliever, and likely one of the few medicines in existence at the time that was in any way effective at relieving pain.
Now, thankfully, the landscape looks quite different. Thanks in large part to the advances in modern medicine and science, and the great advances in palliative and hospice care, the agony and brutality of death can largely be treated and managed much more successfully than at any other time in human history—though access to this important care is still shamefully limited in many areas.
While the holy work that palliative and hospice care centers do must be celebrated, somewhere along the way, as our fear of the physical agony of death began to subside, much of the Western world began to try and make peace with death—to treat it as something other than the final enemy.
And to understand and explain death and eternal life in an earthly context – continuing the things we like and avoiding the things we don’t. I heard a eulogy once where the speaker hoped that there was a chance in heaven to do a lot of fishing, which the deceased enjoyed, but that he would never have to bait the hook, which he did not.
All that is well and good. But we have questions. Legitimate ones, not absurd scenarios meant to entrap like the Sadducees concocted. But heartfelt ones calling answers that offer relief.
While I was working in Temecula, I rented a room in a house across the street from one of my parishioners. He had told his neighbors, jokingly, that they better start behaving because a priest was moving into the neighborhood.
A woman who lived a couple doors down approached me one night as I was unloading my car. It was late and very hot that summer night. But she was very determined to talk to me. And with little more lead in than telling me her name and where she lived, she asked whether she and her husband would be together in heaven.
He had died recently and she was in despair. He had been married before, she told me, and she was so afraid that in heaven he would be with his first wife and she’d be alone for eternity. “You’re a pastor,” she said, “you must know what heaven is like.”
The fact is, I’m like everyone else. I don’t know. I don’t know if the streets will be paved with gold as my great aunt sincerely believed. I don’t know if St. Peter will be checking names at pearly gates. I don’t know if there’s really a rainbow bridge that our pets cross when they die.
What I do know is that the love we have for each other here does not end. Marriage is an earthly function, not a heavenly one. The lives we make together here will end. But the connections of love that bind us are a reflection of God’s love for us and that is eternal. Love is life, eternal life.
The details of eternal life are, properly, the mysterious work of God to be revealed how and when God chooses. At every corner of our existence, at every moment since God called forth creation out of nothing and called it good, God is at work, swallowing up the defeat of death in the victory of Christ’s resurrection and life. That is the reality and promise of our faith that we rightfully claim and hold onto.
I also know that as Christians, we must work to ease suffering and to bear one another’s burdens together. To sit vigil at the bedside of a loved one who is dying is to come on bended knee onto holy ground. It is the place where we recognize and make peace with last things and first things. I’d like to share with you a litany called The Living of Last Things by Douglas McKelvey:
“I know that I am not long for this world, O Lord, that I am even now, perhaps already living a litany of last things, some long-since completed before I even knew to name them so:
Last conversations with people I love
Last outings to places I delight in
Last enjoyment of spring flowers or autumn leaves
Last times savoring favorite foods
Soon there will be a:
A Last sunset and a last sunrise
A last marveling at the moon or wondering at the stars
A last awareness of the color blue
A last shared joke or story told
A last visitor
A last hand held, a final squeeze
A last letting go
And then – there is that first hello. That first opening of my eyes in a place I’ve never seen but have always known as home. And there, my king and my Christ, is where the real wonder begins. Yes, in dying I must first release everything that I hve stewarded or enjoyed in life, for I cannot seek to hold any of the things or this world. They have been temporary gifts foreshadowing greater glories and richer joys.
For when this world is remade, and I walk again in a renewed creation, all of these last things that I now grieve will be somehow redeemed and restored to me in their truer, better forms. So let me see with a more penetrating gaze even now, O God, the holy ini every good thing to which I must bid goodbye. You are the one thing I need never release nor big goodbye.
For you already have been through this, through this willing laying down of all things at your death that you might attain instead the unfading joys set before you.
You will remain with me, Lord Jesus, as I follow the trail you blazed, as I also pass from life to death to life – as the last of these last things gives way to the first of those first things of eternity.”
“God is God not of the dead, but of the living…”
For the Sadducees, death was simply the fate of every human when we’ve run out of life. But God isn’t satisfied with that outcome, it seems. No, to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, is to believe in the God who is life; who is love; who creates life, sustains life, and ultimately, is the God who breaks death’s back once and for all in Christ’s resurrection from the dead.
“God is God not of the dead, but of the living…”
We affirm this at every funeral, when we stare death in the face and sing that ancient song of defiance: even at the grave we make our song Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!
May the living God; the God of love who is the author of life, continue to sustain us until we stand at last among the saints whom no one can number, whose hope was in the Word Made Flesh, as the words of our Savior enliven our hearts: “Servant, well done!” Amen.