Sunday, November 7, 2010

Secularism, Sadducees, Age to Come

I am using a Year C lectionary for the twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost and the Gospel passage Luke 20:27-38 to scribble a few thoughts.

If anything, the historic Jesus did not like all the rules, the written rules of the old Judaism. It is not surprising that he gets into conversation with members of the Sadducee sect that some say was more a political party than a true branch of religious belief. They only believed in Mosaic Law and did not believe in what they could not see.

You might say that the Sadducees were the prime Secularists of Jesus’ time and place.

Anyway, this sect did not believe in resurrection of the soul after death. To make a point, they pose a question to Jesus about seven men married to the same women over time, dying and having no children. The question is which husband will have the woman at his side in the next life if resurrection is real.

Jesus replies that there is no marriage in the next life. The resurrected are “like the angels” meaning they have no sex or permanent body in the “age to come”. The spirit or the soul is without exact matching human or earthly qualities. We become “children of the resurrection” to God the Father.

This is where Jesus is the real deal. He does not write things down. He responds with the insight of the divine side of his nature and seeing a different way of looking at the great beyond is born. This is a paradigm shift in western thought.

Those of Islam will say “the Koran teaches us that…”. No Angel Gabriel is needed to deliver a written message to Jesus’ crowd from the Almighty over and beyond what is already written through the generations since Moses. Jesus is the word made flesh.

Jesus is the real deal and discloses, reveals, looks through the veil that separates us from our ultimate nature in close proximity and union with God.

So too, the nature of a timeless eternal God is revealed in that we may view history through the lens of our mortality - As for God:
37 But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’  38 He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”
Luke 20:27-38 (New International Version)

The Resurrection and Marriage

27 Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. 28 “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. 30 The second 31 and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. 32 Finally, the woman died too. 33 Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”

34 Jesus replied, “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. 35 But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, 36 and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection. 37 But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ 38 He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”