All children learn sooner or later that things aren’t done
the same way in all homes. I learned that lesson early on, when I went to the
home of a friend to play. Her mother expected her to help wax their bathroom
floor after we finished with our playtime. I didn’t even know that bathroom
floors needed to be waxed! The way
things were done in her home were very different from the way things were done
in my home. Rules and practices don’t apply everywhere.
The Sadducees learned that when they tried to catch Jesus in
a theological trap (Luke 20:27-38). Luke tells us that they lifted a law out of
the Old Testament and tried to apply it to heaven. Specifically, they used a
law about a practice called “levirate marriage.” (If you’re curious about it, you
can find it in verses 5 & 6 of Deuteronomy 25.) It was considered shameful
for a man to die without fathering a son; so much so that if a man died without
a male heir, the law instructed his brother to marry the widow and produce that
son. Levirate marriage also served a social purpose. A widow without a son had
no one to care for her. Levirate marriage not only carried on the family name,
it made sure that widows were not left in poverty without a means of support.
But this scenario that the Sadducees put before Jesus… well,
it was absurd! “What if there were seven brothers,” they asked, “and the oldest
one died childless. The second brother married the widow, but he died
childless, too; and so on until all seven brothers had married her. Please tell
us – when the resurrection of the dead takes place, whose wife will she be?”
Can’t you just see them snickering behind their hands, like a bunch of teenage
boys telling a dirty joke? They were all ready for Jesus to confess that he
really didn’t know the answer to their question; and then, the Sadducees could
tell everyone that Jesus wasn’t as smart as they thought he was!
But that wasn’t what happened. No, Jesus simply said, in
effect, “We don’t do things that way in my father’s house. In your house,
maybe; but not in mine.” The question that the Sadducees thought was so clever wasn’t
clever at all. In fact, their question about the law was as irrelevant as an umbrella
on a bright sunshiny day. In heaven, there isn’t any need for all the laws that
we have on earth. God’s house is different. If you listen, you can almost hear the
prophet Isaiah whisper, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, says the Lord, and
my ways are not your ways.”
That’s not a bad thing to remember on this All Saints’
Sunday. All Saints’ Day calls up all kinds of memories of loved ones who now
live eternally in God’s house. Some have died recently, while others have been
dead many years. And while we know in our hearts that they are still with us,
our human logic argues otherwise. We look at their graves, and we think,
“They’re gone. We’ve lost them.” And, in a physical sense, they are gone. But lost? They’re not lost.
Jesus was very clear about that in his response to the Sadducees. “God is not
God of the dead,” he said, “but of the living!” God has never once said, “Well,
once upon a time long ago, I used to be the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
and the God of Jacob; but now they are dead and gone, so I guess that all we
can do is to remember them.” No; in God, all of the saints are eternally alive!
They are with us still, as that great cloud of witnesses that the book of
Hebrews talks about. And today, on All Saints’ Day, we celebrate that reality.
But we don’t know everything that there is to know about
life after death, do we? In fact, we know hardly anything! All of us have
questions about death and about the afterlife; and those questions present a
terrible problem to some people. These folks refuse to believe in the afterlife
unless they know everything about it. They ask questions like, “Where is
heaven? What is eternity like? Is God going to make me rub elbows with people I
don’t like? And what about my personality? Does it somehow stay together even
if my body is gone?” Some folks could go on for hours asking questions! They’re
like the Sadducees who pestered Jesus with their riddles. In the end, these
folks will never believe in an
afterlife because they’ll never know all the details about it.
But, you see, we don’t have
to know all the details. Jesus has told us everything we need to know. He told
us, first, that in God, the dead are alive forevermore. We don’t have a clue
how that works – but God does. And I figure that God has that all worked out. Jesus
also told us that the dead are like angels. I don’t know exactly what that
means; but I’m pretty sure that it means that we will be changed into something
other than what we are now. At least, that’s how Paul understood it. He
described it this way: “The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised,
and we shall be changed. For this mortal body must put on immortality.” It’s
like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly. And even though I don’t know all
the details, that makes sense to me. And then, Jesus told us that we will be
children of God: one family through Christ. That family will lack nothing and
will never be parted from one another. And those family ties start here and
now, before we go to live in our Father’s house eternally.
Do we really need to know any more than that? The saints, though they may be physically dead, are eternally
alive… they’re like the angels… they’re a part of the one family in Christ that
includes us, too. I don’t know about you, but that’s enough for me. I don’t
need to know all the details about life after death. I trust that God has prepared a home for me, that Jesus has my back, and that the Spirit will guide me home. That’s all I really know. But – thanks be to God – that’s all any of us really need to
know!
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