Resurrection

The scriptures referred to are Luke 20:27-38.

Sometimes a comedy can bring up a serious question better than a drama can. And I can think of two comedies that deal with a subject central to this Sunday. One is old: The Princess Bride. One of its most compelling characters is Inigo Montoya, a marvelous swordsman who has been seeking the man who killed his father. When he does find his father's murderer, there is a emotionally charged scene where they duel. Inigo, though seriously wounded, disarms the killer, a rich nobleman. Inigo tells him to make him an offer to stop him from taking his revenge. The nobleman offers him wealth and power; in fact, anything he wants. Inigo says, “I want my father back, you S.O.B!” and runs him through with his sword. As he dies, the killer realizes that he could not have avoided his fate for he could never offer him that.

The other film is newer and I have referred to it before. In Thor: Love and Thunder the antagonist is killing various pagan gods after his daughter dies and he finds that his god is indifferent. He seeks a powerful entity called Eternity. If he can reach this being, it will grant him his wish. In the end he manages to meet Eternity, despite Thor's efforts to stop him. But Thor says that rather than asking for the death of the gods, as he intended, he should ask for what he really wants: the return of his daughter from death. And he does.

I often use pop culture references because they are the mythologies of our times and they reflect what we are thinking about. And both of these movies recognize that the chief problem of death is its finality. When our loved ones die, we try to reconcile ourselves to never seeing or enjoying their company again. We work through our grief, but ultimately there is nothing to do but accept that death is the end. It comes for all of us and from an earthly perspective, there is nothing beyond it to look forward to. We try to be mature about it. But what we really want is to have our loved ones back.

The old religions did not believe in resurrection, at least not for the average mortal. They usually pictured the afterlife as a ghostly existence underground, a pale shadow of this life. Even in the earlier parts of the Old Testament, the place where all the souls of the dead go is gloomy Sheol.

The exception to this grim afterlife is the Norse idea of the great feasting hall Valhalla. But even that is not the final fate of the dead. First, it is only for the warriors who died in combat. And secondly, Valhala only exists until they leave it and follow Odin to fight in Ragnarok. Then all the major gods die fighting monsters and the world is destroyed and submerged in water. So it is only a temporary reprieve for the chosen dead.

In Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism, the ultimate fate for those who escape the long painful cycle of death and reincarnation is Nirvana, literally the “blowing out” or extinguishing of the flame of existence. It is a state of total emptiness of anything causing suffering or desire, ie, the self. In some schools of thought, the person is absorbed into Brahman, the principle of oneness with everything, in much the same way as a drop of water becomes part of the sea. But everyone ceases to exist as an individual.

In Jesus' day, some Jews believed in the resurrection of the dead. But not the Sadducees, the priestly class. They were literalists who refused to accept anything not mentioned in the Torah, even if it was written in the prophets. The Pharisees generally did believe in the resurrection of the dead, based mainly on two verses. Isaiah 26:19 says, “Your dead shall live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, you who dwell in the dust. For your dew is as the dew of dawn, and the earth will bring forth its dead.” Daniel 12:2 says, “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Resurrection is also referred to in some books of the apocrypha.

Obviously resurrection, specifically Christ's, is at the center of our faith, or we wouldn't be talking about an itinerant preacher who died a criminal's death 2000 years ago. Much of Jesus' teaching does not make sense if this life is the only one. As C.S. Lewis points out, if you are only going to live for 70 or 80 years, you don't need to think much about the long-term consequences of how you live. So Hitler never had to face the consequences of all the other lives he was responsible for ending when he put the gun in his mouth. Not in this life, at least. As Paul said, “If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” (1 Corinthians 15:32)

But if, as Lewis points out, you will have to live with the person you have become for eternity, the stakes are raised infinitely higher. You are either becoming a larger, more loving, more heavenly person or a more closed in, more hateful and resentful and more hellish creature. And you will have to live with that forever. It's not the decay of the body you need to worry about; it's the decay of your soul and spirit.

We are not talking about the redeemed sitting around on clouds, playing harps, either. That is not how the Bible pictures the afterlife. Ultimately it is about God restoring his creation to what it was intended to be. God created each of us as a unity of body and spirit. (Genesis 2:7) As Lewis put it, we are amphibians, capable of operating in both the physical and the spiritual realms. And just as God will recreate and in a sense resurrect the heavens and the earth, he will also resurrect us to live in his new creation. The main difference in us will be that, like the resurrected Jesus, our bodies will not be subject to our present limitations, such as those of time and space. (Luke 24:13-15, 30-31; John 20:19) Or death.

Which makes our reunification with our loved ones possible. As God said, it is not good for a human being to be alone. (Genesis 2:18) After all, we were created in the image of the God who is love. (Genesis 1:27; 1 John 4:8) It would not be paradise if we were all confined to our own private heavens, unable to interact and share love with others.

But those of us who are happily married might be alarmed by Jesus saying there will not be marriage in heaven. The problem is thinking that there should somehow be no change in the nature of our relationship, unlike what we find in every other stage of life. There are always changes. When we are born, we are helpless. A parent has to become our complete caretaker. As we grow and can do more for ourselves, ideally a parent gradually becomes less of a caretaker and more of a mentor. When you are an adult, a parent can become an adviser, a counselor and even something of a friend. Then, as your parents grow older, you may become their caretaker. The love remains; the form it takes and the roles you play in the relationship change.

We long-time married people see glimpses of these kinds of changes already. We are no longer giddy newlyweds who see our spouse as the epitome of their sex. If we are fortunate, we have seen that white-hot infatuation that sparked and fueled our pursuit cool to a more livable temperature. We see the person we are married to as they really are, and not as what we projected onto them. Hopefully we are not merely lovers but comforters, encouragers, friends. The wrinkles, the changing body, the grey hair, or lack of hair don't mean that much because it is the person and not the appearance that we have come to love.

Some of that comes from learning to put up with imperfection. And I don't just mean physical imperfection. None of us are perfect in the moral or spiritual spheres. We are not paragons of wisdom, or faultless in our speech or given only to noble deeds. We make stupid choices and sometimes deliberately bad ones. We fail to be even the person we could be. And so in this life we should be in the process of learning to be more forgiving, more merciful and more understanding of others as well as ourselves.

Although those qualities will remain, having to live with imperfection will not be a feature of God's new creation. While dying and becoming immortal will change our relationships with those we love, there will be no more codependence, no more relationships based on need or weakness or seeing one person as merely an extension of the other. Nor will any person merely be there to stroke the ego of the other. (That latter part explains why putting Hitler in heaven is impossible. Nobody would be worshiping him. Heaven would be hell for him and all narcissists.)

Instead Paul envisioned a radical equality where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female because we are all one in Christ. (Galatians 3:28) And that ideal will become real at last. In 1 John it says, “Dear friends, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that whenever it is revealed we will be like him, because we will see him just as he is.” (1 John 3:2) We were created in the image of God but that image has been marred by our sins. Right now it may be hard to see the family resemblance to God our Father in most of us. But when Jesus, the image of the invisible God, comes, we will be transformed into who we were created to be: perfect reflections of the God who is love. Right now we are like the funny-looking kid who will grow up into a gorgeous adult.

And that's at the heart of resurrection: hope. Things will not stay as they are. They will get infinitely better. At present we live in a world that does not resemble the paradise God originally gave us. The imperfections we live with are not simply small quirks or inconveniences. Some are painful and some are harmful and some are lethal. Some are horrible parodies of who we should be, hellish distortions of our heavenly Father. They are why, while some fear the world is ending, others welcome the end in nihilistic despair. They are without hope.

So were the disciples after Jesus was crucified and buried. They had seen him heal the sick, and raise the dead, and feed the hungry. They had seen him transfigured into a being of light. They had given up everything to follow him. And when he died, so did their hope. If God's Anointed could be killed, what hope was there for them—or for the rest of the world? Was there even a God or was this some cruel joke? I bet none of them ate much or slept much that Friday and Saturday. And when they finally dropped off from exhaustion, they were visited by nightmares. They were haunted by the fact it was all over.

And then on that Sunday morning, the women who had gone to perform one last sad duty for their teacher came back in a fright, babbling about something that was impossible: Jesus being alive and solid and speaking words of encouragement. The men thought they were hysterical but 2 of them ran to the tomb and found it open and empty. And then, as the disciples huddled together in a locked room, afraid and confused, Jesus was suddenly there. He had the scars of his crucifixion but he was whole and healthy, able to be touched, able to eat, able to be with them unhindered by doors, distances or death. He breathed on them and began to teach them. Not only was Jesus resurrected, so was their hope. It was not over. It had only begun.

And the torch has been passed on to us. We are to continue bringing the good news of the risen Jesus to a world for whom death is the last word, which extinguishes all existence and all hope.

And so as we remember those who are no longer with us, we grieve but not like those who have no hope. (1 Thessalonians 4:13) For us, being absent from the body means being present with the Lord. (2 Corinthians 5:6) And as Paul said, “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so also we believe that God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.” (1 Thessalonians 4:14) For now they rest. In the future so shall we. Until that day when we all awaken to the dawn of a new creation and see our redeemer face to face as he wipes away every tear from our eyes and banishes all mourning, crying, and pain. And on that day death will be no more. (Revelation 21:4) It will be swallowed up in the victory that began when Jesus rose from the dead. Because he is not the God of the dead but of the living. In fact, he is the resurrection and the life. (John 11:25) We say that where there is life, there is hope. And where there is eternal life, hope never dies.