First Presbyterian Church

 

First Presbyterian Church

Rev. Sam Pendergrast

November 11, 2007

Luke 20:27-38

 

"What Good Is Resurrection?"

 

 

When I was in my early twenties, I was visiting cousins in North Carolina.  One night after going to bed, I looked at the ceiling wondering about eternity. “What's it like to be dead? What is heaven like? What will we do for eternity? Is there time in heaven? Where is heaven, anyway?” You've had moments like that, puzzling over the big questions, wondering what it all means, where you fit in.

 

Christians proclaim faith in resurrection, and not just in a general idea about life after death. We are quite specific in the Apostles' Creed: “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” At death we do not escape this life. That is an idea promoted by other religious traditions. We believe in the goodness of created things, including our bodies. We will be raised to a new and perfect state after we die. The whole creation itself will be reborn. Such a concept is impossible to grasp. No wonder the stories of near-death experiences are so popular. But so far no one has come back to tell us what's on “the other side.” Even Jesus is little help. At the end of this conversation with the Sadducees, he merely asserts that the resurrection is a higher reality than earthly life. He does not answer our questions. What about cremation? What about people eaten by sharks or who have lost limbs? Is the resurrection only for people? Will we know each other in heaven? What about my old dog, Spot, the companion of my childhood and youth?

 

Most of those questions come from our curiosity and speculation. That night long ago in North Carolina, I was curious, but not desperate.  Questions about heaven were interesting; they were not crucial.  I was young, without a care in the world, full of optimism and adventure, healthy as I could be.  My parents and siblings were all just fine.  I had no spouse or children to think of.  Nothing was at stake.  “It would be interesting to die,” mused my carefree brain, “to see what eternity is like.” Ha! How naive.

 

My college chaplain at Furman University told of a time when the late Carlyle Marney, a well-known Southern Methodist preacher and lecturer, came to campus. When a student asked, “Dr. Marney, would you say a word or two about the resurrection of the dead?” Marney replied, “I will not discuss that with people like you.”  “Why not?” asked the student. “I don't discuss such matters with anyone under 30,” Marney said. “Look at you, in the prime of life. Never have you known honest-to-God failure, heart-burn, powerlessness, real defeat, brick walls, your own mortality.  What can you know of a dark world which only makes sense if Christ is raised?”

 

As a pastor, these questions take on more urgency for me when I visit people who are living in the shadow of death. What does resurrection mean to the 40-year-old dying of cancer who will leave behind his wife and two young sons? What makes the difference between a person who gives up on life and sits at home waiting to die in her late 70s, and a person who serves as a nursing home ombudsman into her 90s and plants a flower garden out back of the retirement home where she lives so that the “old people” will have something pretty to look at? All of this despite being blind in one eye. What can I say, if anything, to a woman who has lost interest in living and is simply waiting for the end? How can resurrection hope infect our life today so that we are not simply sitting around waiting for God to rescue us, but living today the new life that God offers?

 

There are some questions that ought not to be asked except by those who are famished for an answer. When some Sadducees ask Jesus about the resurrection, they are not really hungry. They've gone to Jesus for a little theological ping-pong. The Sadducees were privileged. They were a group of wealthy, lay nobility, who were a powerful voice in the Sanhedrin, the ruling council of Jerusalem. They rejected the teachings and interpretations of the Scribes and Pharisees, who were the pious interpreters of the Law of Moses. The Sadducees were focused on their position and power, and on living a good life in the here and now, because, after all, you only go around once in life. Get what you can.

 

So that's why, on the surface, the encounter recorded in this text seems like little more than an interesting speculation on eternity. What can Jesus say? I've heard it said, “There is no right answer to a wrong question.”  The German theologian, Karl Barth, said, “The Bible gives to every person and to every era such answers to their questions as they deserve.  We shall always find in it as much as we seek and no more.”  I think he means that the more you seek, the more there is to find.  The more desperate you are for resurrection, the more real it can become to you. When you find that you have cancer; when your parents die;  when you find that your child is critically ill or injured; when your spouse dies; when you lose your income;  when you or your children are in the middle of a divorce; when you look down the road and see your own death staring you boldly in the face –  then, and maybe only then, can you start to get an idea of what resurrection is all about.

 

There are stories in the Bible of those who got a much different answer to their questions. To Martha, groping her way through the darkness of grief at her brother's tomb, Jesus said, “I am the resurrection.” To Mary Magdalene, blinded with tears outside another tomb, he gave the answer beyond all answers when he called  her by name from the other side of death.  Ask the question with tears among the shadows of death, and you may hear your own name spoken by the Lord of life, calling you through your pain to a place of new life. Ask the question, as did the Sadducees, in the comfortable light of a temple under your management, and what you hear may send you away scratching you head.

 

We will always be scratching our heads in one respect, because our perspective is so limited.  We can only see and know through our own experience.  Our experience is of the way things are.  Resurrection is about the way things will be, and about the life God makes possible for those who join their lives to the Lord's way.

 

The Sadducees couldn't make sense of resurrection because it didn't fit their idea of how the world works. Life had meaning through family and having heirs to carry on your name, having children to care for you in your old age. That's why Moses gave that law that seems so strange to us. The law of Levirate Marriage required that a man conceive a child with his brother's childless widow to provide an heir for his brother and to provide a caretaker for her in her old age. In the world of that day, what was at stake was the social order, the rights of a man to a woman and the rights of a woman to support in widowhood. The law was strictly enforced and men who refused to do their duty were publicly humiliated. The Sadducees could not envision another reality. Resurrection seemed absurd to them. “So,” they say, “Who gets her in the resurrection?” “Wrong question,” says Jesus. “Resurrection life is not about getting and having, but about being God's children, all together. No distinctions. No powerless women and powerful men. No death. No need for marriage or children.” In the resurrection, we all will know full intimacy, companionship and love in a way that we only anticipate in this life. We can't imagine it any more than a child catching fireflies on a summer evening can imagine the world of adulthood with all its complex joy and pain.

 

Another reason we may end up scratching our heads is because of the ideas we have about immortality of the soul. That is an idea from Greek philosophy, which teaches that the soul is divine and the body is mortal. It is an idea foreign to the Bible. Reports of near-death experiences, where people simply walk down some sort of tunnel to what they take to be heaven, reinforce that way of thinking about death and eternal life. Immortality is like Bruce Willis in “Bulletproof.” It is a belief in some inherent quality in the person that transcends mortal life. As if souls just kept on living because it is in the nature of souls to live. Scripture teaches that we will die, completely, body and soul. We are mortal, not immortal; resurrection is the gift of God. Our hope comes from the trust that the new life of the risen Christ already is part of the life of the believer. Our life does not end with physical death, in so far as we are joined to Christ. We cannot answer the question about whether we will know eternal life with God immediately after our death, or if we will 'sleep' until the final resurrection.  But what we do believe is that our lives will one day find fulfillment in the resurrection of our Lord.

 

In the end, all our wondering about what heaven will be like is about me and us. What will I do? Who will I see? Will my dog be there? The resurrection is really not about us at all. The resurrection is about God. Resurrection is about a God who will not abandon his creation, his children. Resurrection is about God's unwillingness to let us go, to let us sink in sin or forever suffer the consequences of our own destructiveness. Resurrection is the end of a story that began with creation. It is the story of the God who said, “Let there be light,” who saw that the world was good, and who wills to redeem it from sin and imperfection.

 

The question I should have asked, lying in bed that night, was not, “What's it like to be dead?” but instead, “What's it like to be alive?” Because that is God's concern in bringing us to salvation: for us to be fully alive.  Eternal life is life with God, living with God as Christ is with God, and living with one another as Christ is with each one of us.

 

The Sadducees, in their flippant question to Jesus, present a hypothetical woman, who is to them no more than property for someone to have.  What if she was real, and she asked Jesus, “Lord, it was Eli I loved best; will we be together in the resurrection?”  Or, “Lord, they all treated me awful; am I free of them in the resurrection?” Or even, “Lord, I loved all seven like crazy; can I have all of them in heaven?” Who is to say that our Lord's answer might not be, “Yes, dear daughter, even better than you can imagine.”

 

We will wake one day, and will not have been a dream. But all of the parts that have made this life a nightmare will have been done away with, and we will wake whole and healed of all that has threatened to undo us. Of course we don't know what it will be like. But one thing we know is that in the resurrection we are all whole persons beloved of God. Relationships and people are made new and are marked by the love we know in Christ.  Jesus' point in the end, I think, is that whatever the resurrection is, it is utterly other than what we have known, and its center will be the One we know as our Lord and Savior.  All that is temporary, cultural, political and religious will fall away.  But what is real, what is love, will be lifted into the light, and all will be transformed, and all will be children of the One whom Jesus called “God not of the dead but of the living.”  In the resurrection, which begins now for all who are joined to Christ, we know what it's like to be truly alive.