32nd Sunday Ordinary Time
2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14
2Thessalonians 2:16-3:5
Luke 20:27-38
This week’s gospel reading raises some puzzling questions for me. Jesus’s argument in verses 34-36 seems to assume that the reason we marry is because we will die, because he says the reason resurrected people do not marry is they will never die. But what does marriage have to do with death? Don’t people marry because they fall in love and want to raise children together?
Later, in verses 37—38, Jesus quotes Moses’ dialog with God in Exodus 3:6. Here God declares, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” According to Jesus, this somehow proves the dead are raised because God is “not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.” But what does God telling Moses he is the God of these three patriarchs have to do with raising the dead?
Let’s start by tackling that first question. The ancient Hebrews did not believe in life after death. They sought a kind of immortality through having descendants. This is one reason why God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 15:5 was so powerful for the patriarch: “And he brought him outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’” At this point, the aged Abraham had no son. Abraham was impressed, and placed his trust in God’s wonderful promise.
In Jesus’s day, marriage was still seen primarily as a practical necessity rather than an opportunity for romance. In fact, the connection of marriage with erotic and romantic love did not truly begin until the troubadours in the late Middle Ages. Still, we might question whether our understanding of marriage today has evolved and is no longer mainly about having children but rather about the love two people have for one another. Perhaps Jesus is saying when we are raised we will no longer have erotic desire.
The question then becomes, if we do not marry, what kind of relationships will we have in resurrected life? Will we all be friends with one another? We will have eternity to get to know everyone! Will we have some friends we are closer to than others? I don’t see how we can know the answers this side of death, but it might be good for our spiritual imagination to wonder about these questions.
God of the Living?
An even more interesting theological question is raised when Jesus tells us that, “God is not God of the dead but of the living, for all live to him.” What does this mean?
One way to understand this statement is to see it as an affirmation of how God’s time differs from human time. One of the most oppressive, tragic aspects of being human is that we are doomed to experience time as sequential and in only one direction—forward. Although this weekend we turn our clocks back in the U.S. as we return to standard time, we cannot really ever go backwards in time. Nor can we stop time’s relentless forward march.
Because this is our universal lived experience, we may not consider that things could be otherwise. But we could live in a world where time sometimes reversed course and went backwards. Or we could experience time not in a sequence but simultaneously, all at once. Time could sometimes stop. In fact,. thanks to Einstein, we now know time can slow down or speed up depending upon our velocity.
Our memory does allow us to experience the past in a way, but this is far different from re-living it. We cannot change the past, and despite our memory, it is in a sense lost to us. This is why people grieve for loved ones who have died and for mistakes they have made. I believe people long for transcendent experiences because they allow us briefly to escape from the iron cage of linear forward-moving time.
God is not bound by time as we are.
God is utterly transcendent and is in eternal time. One way to think about this is that for God, all of time is continually present. If you pay attention, you may notice the first five books of the Bible can be seen from this perspective. For this reason a rabbi once said, “There is no before or after in Torah.” We can perhaps get some clue of what this is like if we think back on our life and imagine everything we have ever experienced as somehow before us now and in every moment. Another way to conceive of this is to imagine we are sitting on a mountain watching a person travel along a winding highway. We can see the entire highway from our mountain perch, but the traveler can only see a few meters in front and behind.
If God’s time is like this, then for God, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are just as alive now as they were when they walked the earth. This is one way to understand the phrase, “for all live to him.”
Yet, in affirming that these three patriarchs have been raised from the dead, Jesus is telling us something else about God. “For all live to him,” may also mean that death is something that is utterly alien to God. When Moses asks God what God’s name is, so he can tell his people who will deliver them from slavery, the answer is, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” (Exodus 3:14). God immediately adds that he is also the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
God is the one who is, eternally. When Jesus says, “all live to God,” we could also say, “none die to God.” Death, non-being, is completely incompatible with God’s reality. God is the source of all that is. Death does not exist to God, for God. This is another way of understanding Jesus’s statement that God is God of the living, not the dead. If all live to God, God will raise us all to life.
Because our reality is framed by our entrapment in linear, unidirectional time and by the inevitability of death, it is difficult for us even to conceive of a deathless reality and an experience of time that is different. But I think this is what Jesus is disclosing to us about God.
Our minds cannot truly understand eternity or a deathless reality. Rationalists may mock believers for this embrace of mystery over reason. However, Soren Kierkegaard wrote somewhere that it is the highest exercise of reason to recognize reason’s own limits. It is unreasonable for reason to think it can grasp everything!
Perhaps this is one reason God has given us all an imagination.
