Jesus had many debates with the religious authorities of his time, typically referred to as the Scribes and Pharisees. Usually they were complaining about something he had done, or trying to trip him up in some legalistic argument. Typically he diverts their comments in an unexpected direction as he tries to get them (or us) to see things from a different perspective.
This week’s encounter (Lk 20:27-38) is a little different in that Jesus actually answers the question head-on. The people raising it, the Sadducees, were part of the same religious elite, but they took a conservative view of the Jewish tradition. This was reflected particularly in their attitude to the idea of resurrection. Early Hebrew tradition didn’t have any concept of resurrection – for the early Israelites one could live on via one’s children but there was no expectation of any sort of individual afterlife or life after death. In their interpretation of the early tradition the Sadducees were correct.
However during the 500 years or so before Jesus there was a growing belief in and expectation of an afterlife. Our first reading from the Book of Maccabees, which was written about 120BC, shows this very clearly. This changing belief system was not specific to Judaism but reflected a wide shift amongst many cultures in and around the Middle East. That may have been one reason why the Sadducees were opposed to it – because they saw it as a “foreign” idea imported from outside Judaism. Whatever their reasoning they were definitely in a minority by the time of Jesus, and Jesus very clearly comes down against them.
So in this case we do have a clear and categorical position from Jesus. The dead will rise; there will be a resurrection. End of argument.
Or is it? The problem for us is that there has been another 2000 years of thinking about this topic, and like so much else it’s not really as clear and categorical as we might at first imagine, or hope. What does it mean for the “dead to rise”? What is resurrection, and when is it? How does a resurrected person relate to the person before death? Etc, etc? These questions were flying around from the earliest times in the Christian community, as we can see from many references in Paul’s letters and elsewhere in the gospels.
It seems that at the beginning the idea of resurrection related to a general resurrection of all people, or at least all saved people, at the time of the Second Coming (or the “end of the age”). This is in line with the way Jesus speaks in today’s reading (and the perspective in Maccabees). The idea of an individual passing immediately after death into a “new place” or “another life” evolved gradually and became central in Christian belief by the Middle Ages. It was further embellished through to the Spiritualism of the 19th Century, where the afterlife had been turned into something like the house next door (or upstairs), but with better decor and music. The concept of resurrection, about which Jesus was speaking, was all but lost by this time.
If we are looking to Jesus to tell us that our personal view of what may happen to us when we die is safe and secure, then I fear we are going to be disappointed. Jesus didn’t tell us that. The First Letter of John summarizes it: “we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed”. It does however go on: “We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him” (1 Jn 3:2)
“We shall be like him”. That is a lot more mind-blowing than floating around in the clouds with a harp!
So is there any more in our reading today than a slapdown for the Sadducees, which really isn’t an argument in which we had very much invested? For us the interest may lie not in Jesus saying there is a resurrection, that there is something after death, but rather in his reasoning. The argument he uses, having pointed out that it’s a bit silly to assume that the resurrected life would be just a continuation of the present life, is that the Lord “is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.” For Jesus the foundational principle, always, is found in our relationship with the Father.
God is connected to everything that he has made for all time (or outside of time – which is the same). This may be clearer if we also consider the “other side” of our life on earth – before we were born. As God told Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you”. As John’s gospel says of Jesus: “He was in the beginning with God.” Our existence in God did not start with our birth and it does not end with our death. We have no understanding of what that existence outside our present life is like. What we shall be has not yet been revealed, and what we were we cannot experience. But we know there is a resurrection because there is something beyond our present life, because God loves us always and for ever. We are always alive for him. That we can rely on.