a lawless blog

Resurrection: do you believe in it? Sunday Readings 32nd Year C

Some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, came forward and put this question to Jesus, saying,

"Teacher, Moses wrote for us,
If someone's brother dies leaving a wife but no child,
his brother must take the wife and raise up descendants for his brother.
Now there were seven brothers;
the first married a woman but died childless.
Then the second and the third married her, and likewise all the seven died childless. 
Finally the woman also died. 
Now at the resurrection whose wife will that woman be? For all seven had been married to her."

Jesus said to them, "The children of this age marry and remarry;
but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead
neither marry nor are given in marriage.
They can no longer die, for they are like angels;
and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise. 

That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush,
when he called out 'Lord, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob';
and he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive."

Recently we've had some fun toying with the absurdity of a bodily ascension of Jesus to some place called heaven situated beyond the outer perimeter of the universe. [Link].http://www.catholica.com.au/forum/index.php?mode=thread&id=143358#p143358 The journey, it is said, would take a hundred million years and after a mere 2000 years, Jeshua would be still in transit through the Milky Way, still in our neighbourhood in fact. It is easy to subject bodily resurrection to the same process of reductio ad absurdum. In fact, with this gospel passage, we find ourselves in good company, though the Sadducees made their case from the Mosaic Law as set down in the Torah rather than from the laws of physics. The Sadducees were temple people, conservatives who held that the written law alone was authoritative, as opposed to the Pharisees who believed in oral tradition, on-going and developing, a bit like English case law perhaps.

Jesus' response is in two parts. The first demolishes the underlying assumption of the Sadducees, namely, that marriage would have the same purpose and meaning for the resurrected as it has in this life. Marriage in the context of the Law of Moses was for the begetting of offspring, and the law was framed as a means of ensuring that the eldest of 8 brothers was not without his legitimate heir, a situation that would be meaningless in another form of being where the population was not sustained by new births. Hence marriage for the begetting of heirs simply does not exist for the resurrected. 

The second part of the response throws no light on the issue from our point of view. It simply declares that God is the god of the living, not of the dead, noting that in the Torah (the Sadducees based everything on the Torah) Moses addressed god in the name of his forefathers who had all died of course. 

God is not god of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.

Having got through these distracting arguments and absurdities I would like to stay with this simple declaration about the Mystery we call 'GOD'. I will resist any temptation to investigate the 'how'of resurrection, any curiosity about what it's like to die, where dead people go, and whether resurrection is immediately after death or sometime in the dim distant future on the occasion of Jesus 'coming again'. I find neither light nor comfort in these curiosities.

Are we 'alive', to god? Many of scientific bent are impatient with any suggestion of life continuing or being restored after a person has died. There is simply no evidence for it, and in this they are right - except that after all the scientific enquiries have reached their conclusions it still seems there's more to be said, more questions to answer, more to be resolved. In fact some scientists bear witness to the observed fact that the deeper their investigations go into the make-up of the physical universe the stronger the indications become that there is something 'beyond', something they cannot reach with the tools of physical research. 

I believe that what humanity has universally perceived as 'the world of spirit', or simply 'the spiritual' is reality beyond the reach of the physical sciences as we have them at this stage. And I believe the Spirit shows itself because it wants, or needs, to be recognised and known by the intelligent mind that has evolved in us. This is what I call god.

The Mystery who reveals itself is a mystery of life. Recently I was watching an interview on the TV [LINK http://www.abc.net.au/compass/s3860821.htm  with Colm Toibin, the Irish writer who in his 2012 work The Testament of Mary has investigated how it might have been for the mother of Jesus, trying in hindsight to come to terms with what happened to her son. At the close of the interview they got onto death and dying. I find the idea of extinction, personal extinction, to be deeply strange and unimaginable and not something one faces with equanimity.  I don’t think I’m alone in this. But what’s very interesting is when I think about the great fervent Catholics I've known, when it came to those years, those days, they didn’t want it either.   

I shouldn't paraphrase Toibin, but in trying to recall from memory what he had said I came up with this version: About the afterlife? Well, you know, I feel it's only right. We want it to be. We don't like the idea of our life being snuffed out and that's the end of it.

What impressed me at the time was that his answer came, not from catechism, dogma or accustomed ritual, but from deep inside his humanity. "The idea of personal extinction is deeply strange and unimaginable..." I've come to those years, those days, and I too find death repugnant. The desire to live, the need to live on, is integral to life for us 'conscious beings'. So basic is this desire that it appears to be a primary fact of experience. Because we have memory and foresight beyond that of our animal cousins, our desire to live on is a bit more than the survival instinct that turns on when any animal is threatened. I wonder, in any debate about whether "life" extends beyond our death, if the onus of proof should be left at the door of those who deny it, those who would claim that the commonly accepted meaning of this primary and universal experience is mistaken.

My God is a god of Life, not of Death. I worship the Living God, the Life Process if you like, or just LIFE, as Tony Equale (a contributor to Catholica) would have it. If after my short journey of physical experiences I should be absorbed into some order of LIFE beyond this physical order, then this would seem to be fitting. 

What then of faith? Two points: the idea of death not being the end, of 'life' extending beyond the grave, was current at the time of Jesus. The Sadducees were among the minority of sceptics. The expectation that we read of in today's First Reading was common. Hence the resurrection of Jesus was not seen as something new. That he appeared in some bodily form was novel, for sure, but the apostles saw this as proving that he had been vindicated after his shameful trial and execution, and the truth of his innocence had won the day. In this sense he vindicated the innocence of all god's children, inviting them to overcome the paralysing fear of guilt and death in the hope of being freed from all constraints in this further life that does not end. Death was shown to be a fraud, a fake ending. It is not an ending at all, but a beginning, for all that the transition is utterly unpalatable to us.

Secondly, Jesus has shown by his own attitude throughout his life that we do best when we acknowledge that we have been loved into existence. And maybe that's the key to all of this: it makes no sense that we would be loved into existence and then, after our brief walk across the stage, be terminated - to make room for others! I worship a Living God and one who loves me in a way I think of as personal and individual and friendly and caring and kind and interested and - well, like the way my parents loved me. Endlessly too.

So where's the proof? There ain't none. No proof. It's only a conviction based on this belief I choose to have, this trust I choose to hold onto: something I call 'faith' - fidelity/trust. Is this reasonable? Eminently so, for in my deepest conscience I recognise the rightness of the positive stance this belief entails in the face of life's unanswered conundrums. And from the other side, I acknowledge that this beautiful existence is an enormous gift from one I trust would not play tricks on us. 

I like the idea that we who enjoy conscious life are called to contribute intelligently to the progress of evolution. It means that overcoming obstacles or weathering storms has purpose, for in doing that my small self contributes to our destiny, advancing humankind towards some magnificent goal. We are like rowers who take their turn in relays, and when our turn is done we retire to a mode of being other than this one, perhaps even made better for our contribution along the way. Is this just dreaming? If so, it's good dreaming.

As this reflection has developed it has carried me along, to my surprise, into a totally personal statement of what I think about life after death, 'resurrection', and all that. I am wondering now, whether any readers would like to add a comment, even from their personal stand-point. I'm reminded that only when our commitment is totally personal is it authentic. Just agreeing with formula teachings doesn't have much weight, I should think.

Tony Lawless