Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
2 Thessalonians 2.1–5, 13–17; Luke 20.27–38
“God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation…to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
‘The Question of the Pharisees’ from Harold Copping’s ‘Scenes from the Bible’ (before 1907).
Why are you here?
Is it because you want to receive Communion? Good reason. Is it because you slept in this morning? Because you love the ambience in St Mary’s on a winter evening? Because it’s more interesting than yet another repeat of an old episode of Antiques Roadshow?
As long as worshipping God in His Son Jesus Christ is at least one of your reasons for being here, then St Paul has a different and more fundamental answer as to why you’re here. He writes to the Christians in Thessalonica, then as now a large Greek city, that “God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation…to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
So you are here tonight because God called you to be here, so you might obtain glory: glory in the world to come, when you are raised from the dead in Christ, as Christ was Himself raised from the dead by the Father.
The idea of Resurrection strikes many people as silly, and often they think that’s because they’re sophisticated modern people who believe in science. But actually, Resurrection struck a lot of people in the ancient world as silly too—this includes the people mentioned in our Gospel reading, the Sadducees, who were a group of Jewish religious leaders who seem to have done a lot of the administrative work in the Temple at Jerusalem in Jesus’ time.
We don’t know a lot about the Sadducees, and most of what we do know was written by their enemies so isn’t entirely reliable. But we can be pretty sure about a few things. They were good administrators, and at their best they were very learned. They were drawn from the upper échelons of Jewish society in the Holy Land, enjoyed the good things in life and had no worries about spending money on luxuries. And they didn’t believe in Heaven, Hell, spirits, angels, or demons—any more than they believed in the Resurrection.
In fact, from the way they question Jesus in this passage, they find the whole thing ridiculous. That’s why they challenge Jesus with a contrived story, that feels like it came out of a Woody Allen or Cohen Brothers film, about a woman who, after her husband died before they had any children, remarried his brother. This was something required in the Law of Moses, which the Sadducees were experts about. This turned out to be just the start, as this woman seems to have been the ultimate black widow. Seven times after another her husband died, without giving her any children, as she gradually worked her way down the ranks of the brothers. They must have been laughing their heads off as they asked, which of the brothers would the woman be married to after the Resurrection? These clever city sophisticates are clearly enjoying themselves sporting with this nutcase of a hick preacher with his thick Galilean accent and his ridiculous ideas about the afterlife.
The problem the Sadducees have is that their idea of Resurrection is too small. They think this is a silly superstition about getting to live forever if you’re good enough. Jesus tells them instead that we will be transformed: in Heaven, we won’t marry, because we will be transformed into something more than we are now, into beings who are equal to the angels.
This can seem like something fantastical. It’s hard not to absorb the message in our materialistic age that human beings are purely physical beings, almost like biological robots, and when our bodies die, then all that we are ceases to exist. But if we’re more than that, if we’re creatures of soul and spirit as well as of flesh and blood – something I think we all instinctively feel even when the world around us tells us to suppress the instinct – then the idea of Resurrection becomes something much more credible and natural.
After all metamorphosis is a common enough natural process that we all explored it in primary school, when we kept the tank of frogspawn that turned into tadpoles and then frogs. Yet it still feels miraculous. The miracles of physical nature points towards the miracle of our spiritual nature. What we are now is a seed from which will grow what we were truly made to be spiritually, just as happens physically in nature. How can we imagine what we will be after we are transformed to be fit for eternal life? Well, how could a caterpillar imagine flying, or a tadpole imagine leaping through the air? Yet that is what tadpoles and caterpillars do – remaining the individual creatures they always were, yet transformed into something beyond their ability to conceive. So it will be with us and the Resurrection.
This universe, in all its glories, is to us what soil is to a seed. If the universe – mere soil! – is so glorious, imagine how much greater must be the reality for which we were ultimately made.
Now, at first sight, Jesus’ answer to the Sadducees is just a matter of beating them at their own game. Those fellows loved to quote Scripture to catch people out, just as they thought they were doing to Jesus here. But if Resurrection is silly old nonsense, Jesus asks, them, how come God tells Moses that He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? For they had all been dead for centuries when Moses was alive. If He is still their God, then they must have been raised from the dead?
It is easy to be satisfied with this understanding, to enjoy Jesus getting one over on these smug Bible-bashers. But the reference to the burning bush is particularly interesting, and easy to miss.
For Moses, having been raised as an Egyptian, the burning bush was the moment when he first encountered God, and learned that God was something far beyond any idea Moses might have had of Him before. The burning bush changes everything for Moses. So, likewise, knowledge of our true and eternal nature should change everything for us.
Why are you here? Because God has called you to be here, that you might obtain the glory of Jesus Christ. In a moment, come to meet Him in bread and wine and allow Him to feed you as you journey towards His nearer presence in eternal life, which will be much greater than any of us can imagine.
Now glory and honour be to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the Father who made us, the Son who redeemed us, the Spirit who sustains us, this day and forevermore. Amen.
Top image: John Martin, The Plains of Heaven (1851), from the Last Judgement series.
