Sermons

The Freedom of Living in the Resurrection Now 

In the 1998 film about the afterlife, What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams wakes up in a new reality. And as he is getting his whereabouts, a beautiful adult Dalmatian bounds toward him. The camera angle shifts to his point of view, and we see the joy on the dog’s face as she approaches, her tail wagging. “Katie! It’s you! You’re young again,” he exclaims, and the two of them frolic and play in the fields of beautiful grass and flowers. A minute later, he says, “I screwed up, I’m in dog heaven.” 

I had to laugh at the lectionary this week, which seemed to be saying to us preachers, “If you got up in the pulpit for All Saints last week and talked about hope of the resurrection, now you get to explain what that means.” 

Our gospel text today is from the 2oth chapter of Luke. That’s the 20th chapter of only 24. The betrayal and arrest of Jesus are coming on just the next page. (To add a little context, we’ve been working our way through Luke this year in the lectionary, and we’re almost to the end. In three weeks, we’ll shift seasons to Advent, start a new church year, and we’ll be hearing more from John and Matthew.) 

But it’s important to think about where this text falls because it sets the stakes for what Jesus is doing. It’s these teachings that undermine the authorities that make Jesus so dangerous and lead to his capture and crucifixion. 

The section we heard today is part of a trilogy of questions posed by religious leaders to Jesus, trying to trip him up. This time, it’s the Sadducees, the temple elites, and they ask Jesus a question about resurrection. They come to him with this question. “Now there were seven brothers; the first married [a woman], and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally, the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be?” 

To be sure, this question is absurd on a basic level. It asks about a family of brothers and a woman who loses husband after husband. There is no concern for her or for these men. She is merely a hypothetical being used to lay a trap for Jesus. Also, the question is clearly set in the context of a patriarchal system of marriage, not the marriage of equals that we are more familiar with. The authorities seem to be asking which man’s property a wife would be in the life to come, as if that system of property would still hold in the resurrection. There is just a lot to unpack here. 

And I’m glad this question or one like it is in the Bible. At its heart, beneath all the caveats I just talked about, this question asks what the resurrection will be like. In this absurd question is a kernel of sincerity. After this life, will I see a beloved spouse or grandparent again? Will I know them? Will they know me? What kind of health will they be in? Or, like the scene I mentioned in What Dreams May Come, will I be reunited with my animal companions? If you hold faith in the resurrection, it makes sense to ask these questions, to wonder. I too want to know! 

Jesus, in his very Jesus-like way, partially answers the question and partially issues an invitation. He says that, as the Sadducees understand it, marriage won’t exist in the resurrection. Marriage is a practice of creating family that is rooted in our experience of this age, of this world. (Although this did lead me down the rabbit hole of imagining weddings in heaven.) Jesus leaves open the question of how we will experience the presence of spouses or family members in the resurrection. We just know that the way we are organized won’t look like it does here. 

But here’s the invitation I mentioned. What Jesus does here is invite us to imagine a totally new way of being, one that transforms the order of this world. As hard as it is, Jesus tells us not to spend our lives focused on the afterlife, on what, on where, how, and who. In that, there is an incredible freedom. What if we lived without the fear of death? 

He invites us to be “like angels, [like] children of God, being children of the resurrection.” We also hear Jesus tie back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. These are names of special importance for the Sadducees (who are asking the question). That’s because they only recognize the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures, as scripture. And so Jesus is also responding within their own tradition. 

At the recommendation of our rector, I have been reading The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, a 150-page allegory of heaven and hell. In the book, Lewis describes the “grey town” as hell, a place where people can have anything they want, but all it does is create greater and greater distance from one another. And he describes another reality, a valley that is somehow realer than real and makes everything else pale in comparison to heaven. At one point, Lewis writes, “Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved.”1 All their earthly past. 

Jesus tells us to live as if we are not concerned about death. He tells us to become children of resurrection now, to build a resurrected world here. In the Lord’s Prayer that we pray each week before we receive communion, we pray for God’s kingdom to come here on earth as it is in heaven.

We are called to that work now.

1 C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, p. 69