Luke 20:27-40

embrace the paradox

We are nearing the end now. Jesus has reached Jerusalem. His ministry coming to its culmination. The gospel turns to matters of life and death, days of ending and a new future coming into being. The questions posed to Jesus are no longer from curious or even sincere seekers. They are from folks who like to trip up their opponents, catch them in contradictions, embarrass them in public. You can smell these questions a mile away. You know: the kind where the questioner has no interest in the answer, only wants to show how brilliant he is. Or the kind that is so absurd that if someone tries to answer it on the same grounds she gets trapped in an endless cycle of absurdity.

If this is starting to sound like the nightly political talk shows, where “gotcha!” is the high point of the discussion, you are on the right track. Of course, this sort of discourse doesn’t just happen in politics. It happens in the classroom, the boardroom, and yes, of course, in the Church. Congregational meetings, Presbytery gatherings, you name it, there are folks who relish an opportunity to hear themselves speak or ask a question so absurd as to derail the entire body wrestling over how to answer without sounding equally absurd. You know the kind.

[Listen now to the Gospel of Luke in which Jesus faces just such a scenario.]

In this case, the Sadducees, an ancient group of scholars who don’t believe in the resurrection, have devised a question that has the veneer of intellectual seriousness but is nothing more than an attempt to embarrass Jesus. Unless you are a Mormam or a literal-minded Elizabeth Taylor, what to do with your seven spouses in heaven is not something you spent a great deal of time worrying over. Right? The question is a “how many angels dance of the head of a pin” type. Like we really care about the answer.

But, let’s just say for the person who has been married more than once it is really is a question about a reunion in the afterlife. For some imaging this reunion is either is either a scary prospect or hilarious one. For others though it presents a joyous conundrum of excruciating choices.

Thankfully, what Jesus does is challenge the entire premise of the question, shifting the ground underneath the whole notion that eternal life will have continuity with the details of life as we know it on earth. The premise that everything about this earthly life will be matched in the life to come leads to absurdities of the kind the Saducees posed. So Jesus overturns the whole thing with an elegantly simple response, marriage as we understand it has no parallel in eternal life. It is another realm altogether.

On the one hand, Jesus refuses to enter into the absurd paradigm of those who didn’t believe in the resurrection anyway, yet, on the other, he clearly affirms his belief in the resurrection. “God is the God of all the living, including those who have gone on before us. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” In one fell swoop, he dismisses the absurd while embracing the resurrection. No wonder his opponents were once again silenced.

All that is left after the silence is the belief in the Resurrection : the very thing they wanted to avoid and Jesus affirmed. That leaves it for us to ponder as well. We rarely discuss the resurrection outside of Easter and funerals, and sometimes not even there. Amid the stories of the one who has died, the pastor may forget to name the one purpose of the service that our Book of Common Worship describes as “a witness to the resurrection.” Such a witness is for some a matter of embarrassment.

For others though it may be more serious than idle curiosity or embarrassment. What about my life? Is there any hope beyond this one? Shall there be reunion and what would that be? I think its important to affirm the questions, to allow for probing the deepest mysterious. As Rilke said, “the important thing is to live the questions now for someday you may live into the answers”

Tony Jones is a thirty-something doctoral student at Princeton Seminary and a leader in the emergent Church. He mentioned being at a conference in which Marcus Borg, a sixty-something very popular New Testament scholar and founder of the Jesus seminar, described the resurrection as impossible to believe for reasonable people who rely upon rationale explanations for their faith, and besides, Borg said, it wasn’t at all necessary for Christianity.

Well, Tony Jones went apoplectic. Why? Because scientists and Christians these days understand that some truth is paradoxical and simply can’t be contained by the narrow canons of either / or. For instance, physicists now accept the once controversial notion of quantum mechanics that matter exhibits wave-like and particle-like properties. I’m out of my league here, but one would think that something is either a wave or a particle. But actually we now know that under certain circumstances it can be either a wave or a particle. That is a paradox. Tony Jones says embracing the paradox is no problem for Christians who are capable of allowing for truth that bursts the normal categories of the Enlightenment.

I’m with him. Life is not either / or; occasionally, under certain circumstances it is both, at the very same. Life is about embracing paradoxes that don’t lend themselves to tidy explanations in which you and I remain in control of all knowledge, with all mystery carefully under wraps.

I believe the resurrection is paradox and mystery, both of which I embrace with a certain joy and trust that there are things that are much, much large than I can contain. The late great Madeline L’Engle was fond of speaking of the incarnation – God in the ordinary human flesh of a common Jew, Jesus of Nazareth– as the Glorious-Impossible-made-Gloriously-Possible.

The Glorious-Impossible-made-Gloriously-Possible: I like that. I believe the same can be said of the resurrection to eternal life.

Notice that Jesus himself in defense of the resurrection calls upon another ancient paradox, Moses standing bare feet before a burning bush listening to God. Bushes don’t burn and God doesn’t speak from – yet we know that in actual life things happen that defy all human logic. The earth lights up and God speaks. Lives are changed. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob is the God of all the generations of believers who live in the Great Cloud of Witnesses that have gone on before us.

The dead don’t live and yet in God, they do live eternally.

It’s a paradox that I embrace in faith without any need to explain, even if I could which I can’t.

About the resurrection John Updike wrote these bracing lines:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

[...]

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are

embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance*

Amen.

*From “Seven Stanzas at Easter” from Telephone Poles and Other Poems by John Updike.