Revisiting the Afterlife

Whenever anyone asks me for a good book to read I find myself handing them the same book. It’s a book by Leif Enger called Peace Like a River and I must have bought the book eight times now. I just keep giving it away.

I like the book because, number one, it’s a great story. You just can’t put the book down once you get started because it draws you in. It’s the fictional story of the Land family in early 1960s Minnesota as told through the eyes of 11-year-old Reuben Land, a boy who has a bad case of asthma and who often finds it hard to breathe. The family is led by Jeremiah, a man who has lost his wife and is trying to raise three children, including Reuben.

The story takes a dramatic turn when the oldest son, Davy, ends up going to jail when he kills two intruders who break into the family house and attack the youngest child, a daughter. He ends up breaking out of jail and heading out into the wilds of North Dakota. Most of the rest of the book is the tale of the family going off to find Davy in the midst of the winter.

But along the way there is great writing and there are great observations about life and faith, which are the other reasons I recommend this book. It seems that Jeremiah, the dad, can do miracles. Not earth-shattering, crossing the Red Sea kinds of miracles, but acts of everyday wonder that remind Reuben that there is more to the world than most of us can imagine. Beyond the observable world there is another reality at work and at certain times it becomes obvious. At one point Reuben writes:

Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature...Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave -- now there's a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth. My sister Swede, who often sees the nub, offered this: People fear miracles because they fear being changed -- though ignoring them will change you also.[i]

There are several reasons I thought of this book as I was reading Jesus’ words in the gospel of Luke this week. I’ll come back to another one a little later. But one of them is found in that passage. “People fear miracles because they fear being changed – though ignoring them will change you also.” It seems to me that what we have in the confrontation between the Sadducees and Jesus is a clear example of people being threatened by something they can’t see or explain – in this case the resurrection of the dead. The threat is not only that they can’t get their minds around what will happen after death; it’s also the threat that if they accepted the idea of an afterlife they would have to change in the here and now. Heaven – it’s not just for the afterlife anymore.

The confrontation begins in the Temple in Jerusalem where all sorts of people were gathering around Jesus. He was nearing the end of his earthly ministry and he had finally come to the Temple – the holiest site in Israel. He was teaching and telling people about the Good News of God and he had a lot of eager listeners. But he was also gathering representatives of the religious leaders who were very threatened by him and the change he represented.

One of those groups was the Sadducees. What the Bible tells us about this group is that one of their defining characteristics is that they didn’t believe in the resurrection. This was not unusual. The idea that people would be raised to an afterlife after they died was a controversial notion within Judaism. The Pharisees believed in a resurrection from the dead. There were many images in the Jewish scriptures, particularly in the prophets and the later writings, of a world to come. But the Sadducees represented a branch of Judaism that was skeptical about the resurrection.

So they came to Jesus as he taught in the Temple with a test. They came and said, “Teacher,” which was a term of respect and honor, though you might wonder how much they meant it that way. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote a law for us.” This was where the test began. Moses was the most revered figure in Jewish law. What Moses had left behind, they were supposed to observe. So they start the test by going straight back to Moses. It would be like one of us saying about a piece of constitutional interpretation, “Well, Thomas Jefferson wrote…” Just the name adds weight.

“So,” the Sadducees said, “Moses wrote that if a man dies and leaves a wife and no children that the woman should become the wife of the man’s brother so that they can produce a child for the dead man.” It seems like a pretty bad idea to us in our day, but it was a kind of social security system in biblical times. Women without husbands or sons had no claim to the means of living or land ownership. So this law allowed widows to have status within her husband’s family and perhaps to have a son that would give her future security. It didn’t always produce ideal results, though, as you can see in the stories of Judah and Tamar in Genesis and in the story of Ruth. But it was in the Law of Moses and the Sadducees were going to use it.

So they tell a parable. At least that’s how it starts out. It’s not nearly as good as Jesus’ parables. It’s pretty boring and when they finish with it you would be forgiven for thinking, “Couldn’t you do better than that?” but there we have it. “There once were seven brothers.” Seven is a good number. It means a perfect number of things. This was an ideal set of brothers. And the first one took a wife and then died without children. So being a good Jewish family, they followed the Law of Moses and the second one married the widowed woman but he died also without producing any children. Then the third brother married her and the same thing happened.

When they got to the fourth brother I’m sure he was little nervous about things but he married her, too, and he died. No children. The fifth brother took out a life insurance policy and then did the same thing. Same thing happened. The sixth brother said goodbye to all of his friends and then married the woman. Guess what happened? Then the seventh. Well, you know what happened to him, too. All seven had married her. All seven had died. No children in sight. At last, the woman herself died – probably grateful that there were no more brothers.

“So,” the question came to Jesus, “they all married her and none of them had any children.” So when the resurrection comes, (IF the resurrection comes, they were probably thinking), when the resurrection comes, whose wife will the woman be?

Now there are several times in the scriptures where Jesus stops and has compassion on people who are coming to him with questions or challenges. A Canaanite woman who has an ill daughter confronts him and he tries to put her off, but she keeps after him and Jesus sees her faith and gives her daughter healing. A young man who is trapped by his wealth comes to Jesus and the scriptures say that he loved the young man even as he told him to give away all that had to the poor.

I think Jesus must have looked at the Sadducees in the same way. He must have had compassion because they so obviously didn’t get it. They tell this silly parable that turns on an obscure legal point and think they’re getting closer to the kingdom of heaven, or at least proving a point about it. But they just don’t have the eyes to see.

Jesus dealt with their question about marriage first. Marriage is appropriate for this world and this age where things are broken and life is uncertain and where human love can model the love of God for humanity. But if they only had the eyes to see, the Sadducees would understand that the arrangements God makes for human beings in this life are irrelevant in the age to come. “Those who are considered worthy of the age to come and the resurrection of the dead,” he says, “will neither marry nor be given in marriage.” And because marriage in the law was meant, in part to deal with the problem of death, Jesus adds, “Those who are resurrected cannot even die.” The resurrection is all about life.

This is the point Jesus wants to make for them. Death is the way of the world. As Reuben puts it in Peace Like a River: When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him or her back up. Death is the inevitable limit of earthly life. But because Christ opens the way to life that does not end, death no longer has the power to have the last word. God is not our destiny and all the rules of this age are off. Marriage is a promise of what is to come – not an eternal reality. Children are a promise. God is the fulfillment and the all in all.

What we can do that the Sadducees could not do, at least at the time of their questioning of Jesus, is to see, lived out in human history, the power of the resurrection. The theologian Karl Barth put it this way, “Those who believe in Jesus can no longer look at their death as though it were in front of them. It is behind them.”[ii] Our death is behind us. Jesus died on the cross and that death was not for himself but for the whole of humanity. Paul in Romans says that “we have been [past perfect tense] buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” [Rom. 6:5] There is a new world breaking upon us that the Sadducees can’t see, you see?

To quote again from Barth:
Death may still be the tyrant, but it is no longer an omnipotent tyrant…It can take away from us everything we have. It puts an end to our existence. But it cannot make God cease to be God, our God, our Helper and Deliverer, and therefore our hope. It cannot do this. And since it cannot, we may seriously ask: What can it do? What is all that it can do compared with what it cannot do?[iii]

And if the resurrection has broken all the rules and upset every apple cart, if it has thought outside every box and reframed every paradigm, then why are we still slaves to death’s power? Why do we live our lives in fear instead of confidence? Why do we live as people who have no hope and die as people who believe that death still has a chance to defeat God? What’s sad about the Sadducees is that they cannot envision a world in which God makes an ultimate difference.

Paul knew this was the most critical thing. He knew that if the Christians ever gave up on the resurrection or explained it away as somehow not essential that the game would be lost. In 1 Corinthians he says, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.” [1 Co. 15:19-22, NRSV]

This is our hope. It’s also why we celebrate this day, All Saints Day. We light candles and we remember those who have died, not because we are worshipping them or because we think that if we do not remember them their memories will be forever lost. We light the candles to celebrate what God has done through them and to attest to our faith that this God we serve is the God of the living and in God’s love Abraham and Isaac and Barbara and Rosa Mae and Eleanor and Linwood and Bill and Myrtle are not gone from us or from God. Because Christ lives, they live.

Another reason I give Peace Like a River to so many people to read is because it contains one of the most beautiful descriptions of heaven that I know. Leif Enger doesn’t know any better than you or I what heaven looks like, but his heaven feels like a place I know from having known Jesus and God’s love. It feels right. Here’s just a piece of his description, because I don’t want to give too much away and I do want you to read the book:

And now, from beneath the audible, came a low reverberation. It came up through the soles of my feet. I stood still while it hummed upward bone by bone. There is no adequate simile. The pulse of the country worked through my body until I recognized it as music. As language. And the language ran everywhere inside me, like blood; and for feeling, it was as if through time I had been made of earth or mud or other insensate matter. Like a rhyme learned in antiquity a verse blazed to mind: O be quick, my soul, to answer Him; be jubilant my feet! And sure enough my soul leapt dancing inside my chest, and my feet sprang up and sped me forward, and the sense came to me of undergoing creation, as the land and the trees and the beasts of the orchard had done some long time before. And the pulse of the country came around me, as of voices lifted at great distance, and moved through me as I ran until the words came clear, and I sang with them a beautiful and curious chant.[iv]

Now here’s the good news. There have been days…and I hope you know what I’m talking about as I say this…there have been days when I have felt this heaven on earth. There have been times and places when the earth is filled with the glory of the Lord and I feel it. There have been people in whom I have seen God’s love shining so fiercely that I was burned by their intensity. There have been moments when the earth seems a very thin place indeed because some other, better world is showing through the stretch marks of this one.

“Those considered worthy,” Jesus says, “will experience the age to come and the resurrection of the dead.” What makes us worthy? Grabbing hold of Jesus and recognizing the gift Jesus gives of new life. Don’t settle for anything less. Don’t despise this gift that has been won for you. Don’t turn your back on the one who refused to turn his back on you. Just grab hold of Jesus and hold on because when you do that…nothing will ever be the same. Thanks be to God.

Luke 20:27-38
Then some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came and asked him, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us, ‘If a man’s brother dies and he has a wife and is childless, then his brother should take the wife and raise up a descendent for his brother.’ Now there were seven brothers and the first one took a wife and then died without children. Then the second and third took her. In the same way, all seven did the same and died without leaving children. After all this, the woman died as well. Now, in the resurrection, whose wife will she be? All seven had her as their wife.”
Jesus said to them, “The children of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of the age to come and the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage. They cannot even die for they will be like the angels and children of God, being children of the resurrection. That the dead are raised up even Moses showed at the bush, as he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now this is not the God of the dead but rather of the living, for all to him are alive.”

[i] Leif Enger, Peace Like a River [New York: Grove Press, 2001], p. 3.
[ii] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2, p. 621.
[iii] Ibid., p. 611.
[iv] Enger, p. 302.