The Sadducees were local religious authorities in Jesus’ time. In the gospel lesson today, they have at least two clear intentions for questioning Jesus about the resurrection. They aim to publicly embarrass Jesus and deny the teaching of the resurrection. The Sadducees only accept the Torah, the first five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) to be authoritative. This belief in the resurrection is nowhere mentioned in the Torah. They do consider it to be invalid teaching. So, they come up with the Mosaic Levirate law on marriage from the Torah in which a man ought to marry his brother’s wife, if he dies without children, to give descendants to his brother. They want to show how this whole idea of the resurrection doesn’t make sense when they ask, “Whose wife is she going to be after all these brothers who she had been married to are resurrected?”
While my personal response to the Sadducees would be, “Let HER choose”, Jesus cuts through their trap and sees right through their intentions. The resurrection is not like this earthly life. Thus says Jesus, “...those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.” The &Sadducees’ perception of the resurrection is just another life here. In that version, no wonder they have no high expectations. They already have power and resources. They don’t need a resurrection to get what they want. How about you? What version of the resurrection do you have or not? Jesus’ understanding of it is quite clear: “…Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection…Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” The resurrection is deathless. It is beyond death. Yet, how is Jesus able to say all this about the nature of the resurrection? His discourse on the resurrection is not a theory. It has no scientific evidence that one can experiment and test on. This logic of questioning applies to all of us. When we talk about the resurrection, what exactly are we referring to? There are many ideas about it. The resurrection for some can be a life after death, which is designated to either heaven or hell or purgatory. For others, the resurrection will take place all at once when the second coming of Christ occurs. Since the bodily resurrection is mentioned in the Creed, some Christian traditions discourage cremation while those of modern Christians are concerned with the overpopulation of the resurrected bodies. These are all intriguing hypotheses that Jesus never mentions throughout the gospels. Instead, I would like us to imagine deeper into how Jesus would’ve experienced the resurrection even before his own resurrection. As he reflects on Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush or unburnt bush, he discovers how Moses speaks of “the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” He might’ve just understood these expressions as Moses’ way of connecting himself to all the ancient figures like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that he’s historically related to them and that he professes his belief in the God they believed. Yet this interpretation merely means, “I believe in the same God that all these dead people believed in.” There’s a sense of comfort that he’s following the path of his ancestors yet with a smear of spiritual complacency. Jesus suggests a different approach. He directs us to focus on God, not those who are already dead. What then matters is not that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses believed in God but how God is to them and you. God was and is and will be God of the present, of life, of eternity. There’s no end to God. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses are all dead apart from God, yet to God they are deathless. If and only if they are in God, they are not dead. I imagine Jesus must’ve experienced that he’s able to connect with all these dead folks through God, not the other way around that he somehow experiences God through the dead. In Jesus’ experience of the divine, God is the source of the resurrection in which one is linked to both the living and the dead. One doesn’t have to die to experience the resurrection. Let’s be bold by asking, “Why don’t we have this experience that Jesus had?” Yes, we can in our practice of silent prayer or prayer through the breath of God. We connect with God’s breath through our own breath. In the beginning, we simply pay attention to how we breathe. In doing so, our thoughts and feelings gradually dissipate. (This process of concentrating our breathing may feel like a struggle since our minds are constantly looking for new distractions.) When all we do is this act of breathing, ask ourselves, “Where does this breath come from and where does it go?” Our lives here on earth come and go yet the source of breath, which we may call the Breath of God, remains. This is the Breath that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses were breathed in. This is the Breath that all our deceased ones were breathed in. This is the Breath that the risen Christ breathed on the disciples and is breathing into our hearts. As our breath is transformed into the Breath of God that is deathless, we can have a glimpse of the resurrection here on earth. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
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