Job 19.23-27a
2 Thessalonians 2.1-5,13-end
Luke 20.27-38
Each of the Bible Readings today deals with the topic of life after death, a topic which is very much on our minds at this time of year and which is, of course, especially appropriate on this Remembrance Sunday.
In the Old Testament Reading, Job expresses his confidence in God. The story of Job is the story of a good man who finds that his world collapses around him as he is affected by material loss, sickness and bereavement. Despite all this he remains faithful to God and retains his confidence that God will stay faithful to him.
In the New Testament Reading, Paul writes about the second coming of Jesus and the events that will precede it. Paul calls on his readers not to get carried away by speculation about what will happen but instead to live their lives faithfully, remembering what they have been taught in the past.
And then in the Gospel Reading, some Sadducees mock Jesus’ belief in the resurrection of the dead but find themselves confounded by his deeper understanding of scripture.
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Let’s look at the Gospel reading in a bit more detail. The Sadducees were one of several divisions in the Jewish faith in the time of Jesus. They were in fact the most powerful division of the Jewish faith at the time being made up of the wealthiest parts of the population and having control of the temple in Jerusalem. In order to protect the Temple, and incidentally their own power and wealth, the Sadducees collaborated with the Roman authorities. The accepted as scripture only the first five books of the Bible and, whilst they believed in God, they claimed that there was no evidence in these books for spiritual beings such as angels or for life after death. There is an old joke which states that the Sadducees did not believe in life after death – that’s why they were sad-you-see.
The Sadducees challenge Jesus on this issue of life after death by telling the story of a woman who married, one after another, seven brothers. If she has been married to all seven of them, they ask, who will she be married to when they all rise from the dead? Jesus tells them that they have got the wrong idea about the resurrection and then goes on to quote, from that part of the Bible that they accept, a passage which speaks about those who have died in the present tense rather than the past tense.
I’d love to go into detail about this but I want to keep this short so let me just make two points.
Firstly, people often deride belief in life after death as ‘primitive’ but in fact that is to misread history entirely. The Sadducees were quite right in thinking that the idea of life after death is not clearly expressed in the older parts of the Old Testament. There are some hints towards it, as Jesus demonstrates, but it is not clear. The belief in life after death came only with deeper reflection, and only becomes totally expressed in the New Testament. It’s not a primitive belief at all but part of the Good News of God’s faithfulness which is expressed in the Old Testament but made clear in the New.
The second point I want to make is that the life of the Resurrection is a New life. It is not a continuation of the old life. This is makes spiritualism, which I believe to be utterly deceitful, such nonsense. The resurrected life is in no way simply a continuation of our life on earth, it is a New life in which our primary concern will be the worship of God. The Christian message is not that somehow the life of this world can be carried on eternally – it is that the life of the next world can be experienced even now.
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Some people will find that a difficult message to hear – particularly those who are most comfortable in this life. Astoundingly, some may hear this as bad news, not good. Hence Jesus saying that it is more difficult for the rich to enter heaven than for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. Nevertheless the message is clear. Through Jesus we are given a New life. It is a life which will last through eternity but which can begin right here and now.
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