What does it mean to be
alive? In one sense it’s obvious – a heartbeat, brain activity, a pulse. But
instinctively we know there’s more to it than that. We can be walking and
talking, up and around, but still feel dead inside.
Being alive is about energy
and enthusiasm, a sense of purpose and belonging. Falling in love, having a
child, doing a job that brings us real satisfaction, having an intense experience,
seeing a wonderful view – it may be a fleeting moment or a lasting state, but
we know it when it comes, and we know when it’s not there too.
Our Bible readings today are
all about life and death, but again, it turns out that it’s not just a matter
of having a heartbeat.
In the Gospel reading Jesus
is approached by some Sadducees, who, as Luke helpfully explains, don’t believe
in resurrection.
The Jewish people at the time
of Jesus had many different views of what happened after death. The earlier
parts of the Old Testament hardly mention the afterlife, and generally speaking
early Jewish faith was far more interested in this life and this world. At most
they seem to have believed there might be a shadowy sort of underworld – Sheol
– but it was a place of silence and forgetfulness, really just a sort of
nothingness. . “The dead do not
praise the Lord, nor do any that go down into silence.” said Psalm 115.
The idea of a conscious
afterlife only developed slowly. By the time of Jesus, there were many
different groups within Judaism, just as there are in Christianity today. Some groups
believed in some sort of resurrection, but others didn’t. The Sadducees didn’t.
They were often drawn from the wealthier and more powerful sections of the
community, so maybe they worried that in the afterlife there might be a rebalancing
of the scales, and they’d be worse off!
So that’s what’s behind the
Sadducees’ question to Jesus in the story we heard. They present what sounds like
a very far-fetched scenario; a man marries, but dies without any children. In
Jewish law, there was an obligation for his brother to marry the widow. Any
children he fathered with her would count as the dead brother’s, so his name
and lineage wouldn’t die out. But in this hypothetical case, the second brother
died too, and so the next brother married her. On and on it went, until she had
worked through all seven brothers. Then she died. Whose wife would she be in
the afterlife?
I may have lost you in all of
that – you may have switched off somewhere along the line. If so, don’t worry,
because I think that’s what Jesus did too. Effectively, his response is “O,
for crying out loud, you’re missing the point completely!” Whatever life
after death is like, it won’t just be a souped up version of what we know now. It’ll be so different, he says, that the
everyday questions just won’t apply. All that will matter is that we will be
with God. The questions which might bug us on earth won’t even occur to us in heaven.
We’ll be too alive to worry.
But Jesus is also, I think,
trying to take the focus away from speculation about the unknown future, and
remind the Sadducees that the true life of God – eternal life – is for the
present moment too. The kingdom of God, is among you, and within you, Jesus
says elsewhere. Eternal life isn’t a consolation prize to pick up after death; it’s the experience of radical love, connection,
joy which is indestructible, right now.
I’m reading a book at the
moment which is the fruit of a week’s worth of conversations between the Dalai
Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who are old friends. The book, written by
Douglas Abrams, is called The Book of Joy, because that’s what they came
together to talk about. Neither of their life stories looks as if it should
have produced much joy. The Dalai Lama has lived most of his life in exile from
his native Tibet, trying to sustain the Tibetan Buddhist community against a
backdrop of persecution by the Chinese. Desmond Tutu led the Anglican Church in
South Africa through the apartheid period and beyond it as the nation tried to
rebuild. He’s also been through two bouts of cancer, and was very unwell at the
time of these conversations. And yet, again and again, Abrams describes the
infectious sense of joy these two men showed. If ever there were people who
were fully alive, it is these two. What does eternal life look like – it must
be something like this.
It’s not about happiness. Desmond
Tutu says that “Joy is much bigger than happiness. While happiness is often
seen as being dependent on external circumstances, joy is not.” In other
words, joy comes from a connection with something bigger than ourselves. Desmond
Tutu calls that something God; the Dalai Lama prefers the Buddhist idea of
compassion, but the effect is the same. It’s also about connection with other
people. Desmond Tutu answered a question about his current struggle with
cancer. “I think we ought not to make people feel guilty when it is painful.
It is painful and you have to acknowledge that it is painful, but actually,
even in the midst of that pain, you can recognise the gentleness of the nurse
who is looking after you. You can see the skill of the surgeon who is going to
be performing the operation on you.” Joy isn’t about going around with a fake
smile stuck to your face, pretending everything is all right when it’s not, but
to find it we do need to lift our eyes from ourselves.
We can easily let ourselves
become prisoners of the here and now. If things are going well, we think life
is good, God is good, we are good, and somehow deserving of our good fortune,
but if something goes wrong, then we decide that life is pointless, God is a
monster, or that we are failures. We forget the good times when the bad times
hit. Our horizons shrink to our own immediate concerns. That’s very
understandable, but it’s not usually very helpful. What Abrams discerned in the
Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu was their fearless ability to see beyond
themselves, and beyond whatever they were currently suffering, to set it into a
bigger perspective.
The reading we heard from the
Old Testament today, from the book of Job, echoes that, in a rather different
way. Poor Job. He’s a byword for suffering and misery, and when you know his story,
it’s easy to see why. At the start of the book all is well with him. He’s
comfortably off, with his family around him, but then disaster after disaster
strikes. His crops fail and his livestock is destroyed. His family die, and he
gets ill. He sits in misery, scraping his sores with a potsherd. His friends
come along to console him, but what they say makes things worse, not better.
They try to persuade him that he must have done something wrong, something to
deserve this, and that if he repents, maybe things will get better. He’s
adamant, though, that he’s kept the law, and gone beyond its requirements too,
and that he is innocent. And according
to the story that’s the truth.
So why is he suffering? He
doesn’t know, but instead of giving up on God, his bafflement makes him stick
even closer. He shouts at God, argues with God, demands an answer from him, but
he doesn’t deny him, or his claim on his life. In the end, the only answer he
gets is to be told that even if God explained, Job wouldn’t be able to understand.
That has to be enough and it is enough. The point is though that Job doesn’t give up on God, any more than God
gives up on Job. Throughout this nightmare, Job is still plugged into God, connected
to the source of life. That’s what keeps him going.
Job is a fascinating book,
because it refuses to give the easy answers we long for – the winning formula
for making everything go smoothly in our lives. It shows us that it is quite
all right to be angry with God and to argue with him. But it also shows us Job’s faith. He never
stops believing that he is in God’s hands, and that that is where he needs to
be. “I know that my Redeemer lives,…and in my flesh I shall see God”.
What kind of God will he see? A God who is on his side, he says, a God who is for
him. Job’s friends have a dead, rule-bound relationship with God; he is no more
than a heavenly slot machine to them, dispensing justice impersonally from a
great distance. Job’s God, though, is close, intimate, passionate, alive – and
so Job has a life that is deep enough to carry him through his troubles too.
The second reading, from 2
Thessalonians, finished with a prayer for the Thessalonians, who obviously felt
that the end of the world was just
around the corner. They were “shaken and alarmed”. What do they need in the midst of all this?
Not a detailed plan of the end times or a description of the afterlife, says
the writer. This is his prayer for them, that God “who loved us and through
grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, [will] comfort your hearts and
strengthen them in every good work and word.” The word comfort, repeated
twice here, literally means to be called alongside someone. It’s linked to the
word for an advocate or a helper, someone who is present with you and for you.
When we are comforted by God, strengthened by his presence, even if we don’t
know the answers, even if we don’t know where the road leads, we are safe.
I began by talking about life
and death, so here’s a question to end with. How alive are you this morning?
Not, how happy are you, or how well is life going, but how alive are you, on a
scale of one to ten? If we want to make sure it’s ten and not one, we need to
be securely connected to the life of the God who is life; through prayer,
through stillness, through the Eucharist, through the Bible, through service of
others, in whom we can meet him afresh. Whatever’s going on in the world around us,
whatever might be hurting or worrying us, we have a God who is on our side, at
our side, with life to pour into us that nothing can destroy.
Amen
*The Book of Joy, by the
Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Abrams. ISBN-13: 978-0399185045
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