O God of the living and the dead, help us to come
and see the glory of the Resurrection which is more than we can ask for or
imagine. Amen.
The phrase “more than we can ask or imagine” is familiar to us because it is one of the verses of Scripture that we close Morning and Evening Prayer with. It comes from the letter to the Ephesians in which St. Paul writes, “Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” Because of our self-reliance and limited imaginations, we can be unaware of just how awesome and grand the Resurrection is. It’s like the story of the two fish who are swimming along and one fish says to the other, “The water seems nice today” and the other responds, “What’s water?”. Because we live in a post-Easter world, one in which the stone at the tomb has already been rolled away, it can be easy to be oblivious to the Resurrection all around us.
One
of the great theologians of the 20th century commented that the
Bible gives us the answers our questions deserve, that we shall find in such
answers as much as we seek and no more. In other words, the questions that we
ask limit the answers that we will encounter. Our doubts will impact our
imaginations. Our sins can influence how much peace we find. Our need to be
correct can prevent us from knowing a truth that surpasses all human knowing.
Our biases and opinions can close us off to learning something new.
At
its best, the Church and our faith can help us to ask better questions so that
we will be greeted with better answers. By gathering in the richness and
diversity of beloved community, the Church helps to ask better questions in
considering perspectives that we are blind to. This is why congregations that
all are in the same socio-economic class, or have no racial diversity, or all
vote for the same candidates can prevent us from growing in the faith. We need
diversity because the image of God in which we are made is a mosaic – each of
us is a part of it. And so, the more colorful the mosaic we see, the better the
answers we will find. That doesn’t mean that we’ll always agree with the
questions that others ask, but, if we have ears to listen, we will certainly
hear the Holy Spirit speaking in response.
Speaking
of bad questions because of a limited vision, in today’s reading from Luke we
hear about the Sadducees who are trying to trap Jesus. They ask him, “Hey,
let’s say there’s a woman whose husband dies before they have children. So,
according to the law of Levirate marriage, she marries the next oldest brother,
you know, to keep the family lineage going. Well, imagine that the next brother
also dies before they have a child, and this happens all the way down the line
until all seven of the brothers have married her and died without children.
Tell us, Teacher, in this so-called Resurrection of yours, whose wife will the
woman be?”
The
Sadducees were what we might call conservatives, and I don’t mean that with any
sense of political undertones. They saw themselves as the preservers of
tradition. They defended the written Torah, the teachings of the faith in
Scripture, but not the oral Torah – that is the community’s discernment on
various issues. If it was clear in the Law of Moses, well and good. But if it
isn’t clearly taught in Scripture, they rejected it. And the Resurrection is
one of those things that is not really evident in the Old Testament – sure, we
can find allusions to the idea in a few verses in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.
As Christians, you and I can see sign points to the Resurrection all throughout
Scripture, but the Sadducees didn’t have the insights that the Holy Spirit has
given us.
In
their minds, they were asking Jesus a nonsensical question. It’s like asking if
God can make a married bachelor or a square-circle; these questions make no
sense and therefore do not have an answer that will make any sense. So when
Jesus responds that “in the resurrection from the dead they neither marry nor
are given in marriage,” they have no way to receive this response or encounter
its truth. I ran across a quote this week that helps us to see what is going
on: Stephen Hawking said, “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it
is the illusion of knowledge.” It is one thing to not know something, it is
another to falsely assume that have understanding. This is the sin of
certainty, and it’s on full display here.
Now,
it’s not that Jesus gave them a bad answer, but rather the Sadducees were only
able to get out of that answer what they were prepared to receive. And the same
thing happens to us in our faith. The questions that we ask will shape what we
believe. A version of Christianity that is obsessed with asking questions like
“who is allowed to be ordained, or married,” or “Will non-Christians go to
hell,” or “How can we make sure that we stay in power” will not find the
radical and transforming depths of the Resurrection.
Too
often our questions limit what we ask or think is possible and we end up never
being surprised in faith, never being transformed, never seeing things afresh,
never called to do something differently. Because of our doubts and our
certainties, we, like the Sadducees, can be closed off to what God is doing all
around us.
Simply
put, we will never experience the beauty, wonder, and grace of the Resurrection
if we limit what is possible with God by the questions that we ask or the
prayers that we pray. Jesus says that God is not god of the dead, but of the
living. That’s because to God, no one is ever dead, never forgotten, never
un-Resurrectable. But our questions can assume a god of the dead – a god who
has nothing to do with how we vote, or spend our money, or treat those who
disagree with us, or raise our children, or care for those in poverty. Having
the Resurrection at the core of our faith means always being open to things
beyond what we can ask or imagine.
And
the Resurrection itself is one of these topics that we need to rethink. Like
the Sadducees, modern Christianity has diminished and distorted what the
Resurrection is all about. We often misunderstand the Resurrection to be
resuscitation – that after we die, somehow an immaterial part of us, called a
soul, goes to some immaterial place, called heaven, where it is reanimated
somehow and is alive again. I do want to tread lightly here because a lot of us
were taught to believe that, and it brings a lot of comfort to people. The
problem with such a view is that is closed to the full grandeur of the
Resurrection and is not what Jesus, Scripture, or Christian Tradition has
taught about the Resurrection.
Notice
that in Jesus’ response, he doesn’t talk about souls or heaven. Rather, he says
that the Resurrection is beyond what they are imagining. The Sadducees are
asking a question like what color will the number five be in the Resurrection. And
when we think of the Resurrection as some sort of disembodied life after death,
we make the exact same mistake. When we look at Scripture, what we find is that
the direction of things is not for us to get to heaven, but that’s a trap most
Christians have fallen into. And so we make heaven the goal – we come up with
rules for who gets to go there, and how they get there, and what it is like to
be there. But Scripture, and most notably Jesus, are nearly silent on such
questions. Perhaps because such questions are so limited that we end up with
versions of the faith that are so limiting.
When
we get our questions not from Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost,
or Plato’s philosophy but rather from Scripture, we end up with a far more
expansive view of the Resurrection. The Resurrection is not about us getting to
heaven, rather it is how God is bringing heaven to Creation. This is why the
Resurrection happened in a specific and material time and place. If the
Resurrection was something that only concerned immaterial souls going to
heaven, then we wouldn’t have any of the Easter stories. But, no, we do have
stories of Jesus with a more-than-physical Resurrected body walking around in Israel. It’s almost as if Jesus was trying
to teach us something when he taught us to pray “thy kingdom come on earth as
it is in heaven.”
The
Resurrection, then, is not a heavenly reward, but a present reality – a reality
in which we can live, and move, and have our being in which sins are forgiven,
death is defeated, love is victorious, and grace abounds. Resurrection life is
to be entered into here and now, and perfected and grown into both on this side
of the grave and the other. Resurrected life does not end at death, but rather
continues further on a distant shore and in a greater light. The Resurrection
is not about liberation from earthly life, it is a perfection of it.
This is what leads CS
Lewis to present one of the best understandings of the Resurrection at the
close of his Chronicles of Naria series. He writes of when some of the
characters enter into the fullness of Resurrection life and describes them as
going “further up and further in.” In other words, what we think is real and
true right now are but mere shadows. The glory of the Resurrection is beyond
what we can ask or imagine. Because we have glimpsed the fullness of all things
on Easter, we can have that truth of the Resurrection permeate every aspect of
our lives. But with our flawed questions and beliefs about the Resurrection, we
can limit how grand it can be and we end up turning God into a god of the dead,
instead of recognizing God as the Lord of life.
And this matters because
if we reduce the meaning of the Resurrection to be about what happens after we
die, we both give too much power to death, for it has been overcome by Jesus,
and we limit what it means to be a follower of a Crucified and Resurrected
Savior. The poet Langston Hughes wrote, “Life is for the living; death is for
the dead. Let life be like music; and death a note unsaid.” We end up living in
the shadow of death when we constantly worry about what happens after death. We
end up giving death too much power, too much fear, too much of our lives. Jesus
has clearly told us that he is the Resurrection and the Life and he has clearly
shown us that the love of God in him is stronger than the grave on Easter
morning. So why do we insist on arguing and worry so much about what happens
after death? We already know the answer – all has been redeemed. This does not
mean that we shouldn’t be afraid of death – anytime we experience something new,
anxiety is a part of it. That’s not a bad thing. But turning our faith into a
death-denial or death-removal business is to give far too much attention to
death, which has already been defeated.
The more egregious
problem is when we end up missing out on the rays of Resurrection light which
brighten our world. Because the Resurrection is a present reality, we can live
in a transfigured reality here and now. Already, knowing that Sin has been
overcome, we no longer need to be in the vengeance business, but rather we can
take up the ministry of reconciliation. Trusting that Death has been overcome,
we can enjoy our salvation and welcome others into the abundant life that God
intends for us instead of trying to make sure everyone thinks the same things
as us. Having seen the glory of Resurrection, we have hope in the reality that
all shall be well. In hearing the Good News of Easter, we have every confidence
that love is the truest, most enduring, most powerful, most beautiful thing in
all of Creation and give ourselves to following Jesus in his way of love. In
the shift from “Crucify” to “Alleluia,” we see that all mistakes can be
overcome and all pain redeemed.
But if, because of the
sin of certainty and a mind closed to different ways of thinking, we continue
to ask limited questions, we will be left with a limited sense of the grandeur
of the Resurrection. God is a God of possibility, and in limiting what is
possible, we end up limiting our experience of God. The charge is to keep our
imaginations open, to expect to be transformed, to ask questions like “what am
I missing?” Because the question to ask is not “whose wife will the woman be?”,
rather the question is who are we to God? And the answer worth pursuing, with
all of our life, is that we are all the beloved children of God.
