Photo John Beniston (Wikimedia)
Job 19:23-27a; 2 Thess. 2:1-5, 13-17;
Luke 20:27-38
That Gospel reading may seem to be an odd selection for Remembrance Sunday. We might wonder what has the story of one bride for seven brothers got to do with the rather sober reflections of this day, reflections on war and peace, suffering and sacrifice?
Well this happens to be where we’ve got to, following our course through Luke’s Gospel, as we have been all year. But we can look more deeply. There is a common theme running through all three readings that we have heard this morning. They are readings of contrast: the contrast between the nature of God, and how people fail to understand the nature of God. And that does connect with the reflections of this day.
The book of Job is a long reflection on just this theme. It is a moral fable, Job is a character who enjoys great wealth, peace and prosperity and then suddenly loses everything: his family, his property, his health. And the Book of Job is an extended reflection asking the very human questions that so many people struggle with, “why is this happening to me?”, “where is God in all this?”. But when Job considers the nature of God, it is not so much that he gets an answer, as that his questions fail.
In the graphic short passage we heard today we see Job experiencing himself as a body being consumed by disease. He knows he is a human creature like anything else in creation, something which begins, changes and ends. But Job also experiences God - and knows that God is wholly unlike that. Job’s experience is that God simply, absolutely, is. Beyond question, beyond concept or image, God is absolute existence without beginning, change or end. But, even in experiencing that contrast, Job knows that somehow relationship and hope remain possible: “I know that my Redeemer lives”.
This lies behind the teaching of Jesus in today’s Gospel reading. Jesus has a dispute with the Sadducees, a school of Jewish scholars and priests who did not believe there was any afterlife or resurrection for human beings, nor did they believe in angels or spirits. For them, this life was all there was, and what mattered was to keep everything in order in this life, in this society, by observing the Law and offering the prescribed sacrifices to God.
But it’s clear from today’s story that the idea of the resurrection that these Sadducees reject is simply too limited. They think it must be something just like this life, only carried on afterwards. So when husbands, wives, and everyone else, are raised from the dead, it’s a case of carry on as usual. Hence their question: if a woman has been married to seven successive brothers who’ve all died, whose wife will she be?
But Jesus refutes this by speaking of the resurrection life as something wholly different. It is not like this life. The children of the resurrection are children of God.
The truth that Jesus tells us today is that there is no death in God. For God, death simply doesn’t exist. So that, for God, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive, in the present tense. Never mind that they died centuries before Jesus, and that their tombs were well known. They are alive, because God is alive. Absolutely, overflowingly, vivaciously alive: and they are children of God, sharing in his nature.
So what the Sadducees are wrong about, ultimately, is not the resurrection, but God. They are projecting this life of beginning, change and ending, this life bounded by death, onto God. They suppose that anything new that comes from God must be like that, too.
But Jesus reveals God in whom there is no death. God who is the source of all things, the wellspring of all life, without limit. God is not a creature, not a thing which begins, changes and ends. Therefore God continually gives of himself without being diminished. Life continually pours forth from the heart of the creator, in whom there is no death. There is no limit to the life that God lives, and there is no limit to the life that God gives to the children of the resurrection.
We need to learn, as Job does, that the fulness of life does not lie in any created thing: possessions or health or family or any other things that we might lay claim to and say are “ours”. The fulness of life lies in God, who alone absolutely is, without beginning, change or end.
If we can trust that, if we can believe that to be true, then the life of the resurrection is something we can begin to live even now. All are alive to God, in the present tense. It is in this present moment that God simply absolutely is, without beginning, change or end. It is in this present moment that we can know God in the ground of our being, pouring forth his life without being diminished, like water rising endlessly from a pure spring.
The alternative is to live according to the old way of living, life bounded by death and limitation. If we imagine that this is all there is, then we have to strive to hang on to what’s ours, to stop other people taking it from us. Because this life is limited, we end up in rivalry with others over what we want to possess. And rivalry leads to violence. And violence leads to death. The irony is that if we try to hang on to the little we’ve got, we lose it. We end up with less life, not more. Jesus knew this of course. “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.” (Luke 17:33)
If we conceive of God, and therefore life, in terms of our death-bound existence, this leads not to the true God but to an idol of our own making. And idols, because they are a monstrous reflection of our own limitations, have no source of life in them.
St Paul in our reading from 2 Thessalonians talks about a “lawless one” who declares himself to be God. This idea occurs in a few places in the New Testament: an “antichrist”, that is, an alternative messiah, an alternative revealer of God. But the so-called “god” this figure reveals is monstrous. It is a personification of human society ordered according to rivalrous, violent desires, resulting in idolatry and death. There have been leaders of states and armies who have filled such a role. In St Paul’s day it could have been a Roman Emperor. But we might think more of Hitler, or Kaiser Wilhelm, or of any totalitarian society so devoted to its own ideology that human lives count as nothing.
We remember today the tragedy of war, and its human cost, which we shall be reminded of in the reading of the names of those who died from this small community in two world wars, and particularly the terrible number from the first world war.
The cause of war is always ultimately a failure to believe and trust in God, in whom there is no death. It is a collapse of human society into rivalry and violence as though there were nothing else.
But even when human society fails, even when it falls into the catastrophe of war, God is still present to redeem and to save. Time and again God calls us back to himself, to the gift of resurrection life which he offers.
War is always evil, but once it is unleashed there can still be actions which are themselves good: acts of heroism and self-sacrifice, the defence of the weak and helpless. Any Christian response to war must always be aimed at restoring peace and justice, and that can be at great cost. And we remember this at the foot of the cross, the symbol of God’s own self-giving love, his sacrifice of himself to us in Jesus, so that we - and all we remember today - might share with him the life of the resurrection.
Today we reflect on the cost of war, in the past and today, in so many parts of the world. But we also commit ourselves afresh to live according to God’s ways of peace and justice, and therefore to renounce the ways of rivalry and violence. We commit ourselves to believe and trust in God in whom there is no death, to whom all are alive. For all life and being comes from God, the inexhaustible source, who calls us to himself and gives himself in love. And it is according to that love that we must live.
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