The heart of the matter

Third Sunday before Advent

St Mary’s, Barnes, 8 am

Luke 20.27-38

I love today’s gospel. I love I because it gets to the heart of the matter:  to a central belief  Jesus and therefore of our faith in God.

The Sadducees were the ruling elite at the time, controlling the temple and much of the finance. They took a very conservative view of scripture and because the Torah said little or nothing about life after death they rejected a belief in the resurrection of the dead. This belief had come into Judaism comparatively late, in the previous two centuries, and was held by the Pharisees and most of the population. The Sadducees, trying to show up the absurdity of the belief asked Jesus about the custom of levirate marriage, whereby if a man died childless his brother had to marry the widow to ensure there were legitimate offspring. So they posed the situation of a woman seven times widowed by different brothers. Whose wife would she be in the afterlife? Jesus simply rejects their crude literalism. The next world is of a totally different order. There they ‘neither marry, nor are given in marriage.’ They cannot die any more, and they are like the angels.

Then he directs them to the verses in the scriptures where God is addressed as ‘The God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.’ He is a God who cared for them, guided them, and promised them a future and they continue to live in him and in relation to him ‘For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him’

So today we have no need of a crude literalism. When we say in the creed that we believe in the resurrection of the body we are not to think in terms of a Stanley Spencer painting with everyone climbing out of their graves, great those these paintings are. What this means is that in the next life we will be fully and truly ourselves. In the same way that the same tune can be played on different instruments,  on a piano or a violin, so the tune which is you and me, played here in flesh and blood will be played in the stuff of glory, in a form appropriate to an eternal  existence, which of course we cannot imagine now. The poet Emily Dickinson put it well when she wrote

 I believe we shall be in some manner cherished by our Maker-that the one who gave us this remarkable earth has the power still to further surprise that which he caused. Beyond that all is silence.

Then as the Gospel makes clear our belief in the eternal is utterly dependent on God. It is not that some whispy bit of us lives on, but that who were are, known to God and lodged by Christ in his loving heart, is given a future in his eternity. As this life is a gift, so is whatever likes beyond.

And of course on this Remembrance Sunday, we think especially of those who had their lives cut short in the service of their country. We trust that they know now another King, another country.

This belief in a glorious future is not meant to distract us from our daily tasks in this world. But it does underpin them and assure us that what we do now is worthwhile. As Paul put it, our labour in the Lord is not in vain. What we do out of love has a future, as do we in the love that holds us in being and directs our ways.