Sunday November 6
Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Scripture Reading: Luke 20:27-40
So this was one of the weeks where the assigned readings had me scratching my head and wondering, “What the heck am I going to say about this on Sunday?”
On one level, it’s a fairly straightforward story. The setting is Jerusalem in the middle of Holy Week in the days before Jesus’s crucifixion. Tensions are high. Everyone is just waiting for Jesus to make one wrong step so that he can be arrested. And so a group of people who don’t believe in resurrection decide to ask Jesus a question with no answer.
Here, it’s not Seven Brides for Seven Brothers but rather One Bride for Seven Brothers. If there is one thing that God’s Law, as given to Moses, is very clear on, it is that you are to protect the most vulnerable among you – specifically widows, orphans, and foreigners living in your land. And so the practice of what is called Levirate Marriage was to protect widows. If a woman’s husband died and she didn’t have any children, then her husband’s brother was to marry her to give her a home and to give her protection; and if she were later to have any children, her first born child would be considered to be her first husband’s child.
So along comes this group of people who don’t believe that there is any resurrection, and they ask Jesus what seems to be a silly hypothetical question. “OK Jesus, c’mon now. There can’t be any resurrection, because what about this woman. She was married to each one of seven brothers, and all of them died, and there were no children involved that might make her first husband her one true husband. So if there was a resurrection, she couldn’t be married to all 7 of them, could she? So which one of them would be her husband in the resurrection?” It is an impossible-to-answer question.
And impossible-to-answer questions aren’t that uncommon. I think of my friend’s mother who was an English teacher, and when her school board forced her to include multiple choice questions on her exams – she hated multiple choice questions – she would always prove her point by including an impossible to answer question. For example, “At the end of the play, Hamlet:
a) Hamlet is dead.
b) Ophelia is dead.
c) Claudius is dead.
d) None of the above.
e) All of the above.
An impossible-to-answer question, because you can’t pick e, all of the above, since “the above” includes none of the above.
And so here is a group of people asking Jesus an impossible-to-answer question. How could he possibly decide which of the seven brothers the woman is married to; but he also doesn’t want to deny the resurrection and the fullness of life that he knows is God’s reality.
But what he can do is call his questioners out for asking the wrong question. “Why are you asking who she will be married to. Don’t you know that everything will be different. Good; better than you could ever imagine, but different. It won’t matter who she was married to before because everything will be changed!”
And that is where I landed in my “What the heck am I going to say on Sunday?” conundrum. Because I think that we still don’t know how to ask the right questions when it comes to what resurrection is going to look like. In fact, I don’t think that it is possible to ask the right questions… at least not while we are still on this side of the curtain that separates this life from the life that is coming.
What we do know is that it will be good – better than anything that we could ever imagine. I think that we maybe get glimpses of it, if our hearts are attuned to look for them. We might see glimpses of it in the words and the pictures of books like The Next Place that we read earlier. We might hear glimpses of it in certain songs or pieces of music. And I definitely think that we can catch glimpses of it in the communion meal like the one that we are going to be sharing shortly – a meal where everyone is welcome, without exception; a meal where everyone can celebrate and know that they are loved; a meal where everyone is well fed.
We don’t know how to ask the right questions about the life that is coming, but as Jesus said, God is the God of the living; so if God is with us in this life, how much more will God be with us in the resurrected life?
For God is good; and God is love; and some day we will cross through that curtain and nothing will be between us and that infinite love. Thanks be to God!
In our Story for All Ages this week,
we read The Next Place by Warren Hanson.
Some weeks, the Story for All Ages gives a
teaser for what is coming; this week it gave away
the punchline of the sermon.
It is a beautifully written and illustrated book.
No comments:
Post a Comment