In today’s gospel the Sadducees challenge Jesus. They were a Jewish sect who didn’t believe in the resurrection, or life after death. So, there were ideas of Resurrection, even before Jesus. You can tell they were the original left brained thinkers. All details and facts and abstractions, and logic. They used their unbelief of the afterlife as a cudgel. They were probably Roman collaborators.

The Sadducees really thought they had Jesus this time. Such a clever argument about one brother after another becoming the husband of one woman. It didn’t make sense if heaven was just like being here on earth. Who would she belong to?  Jesus either had to reject the Jewish custom of passing off a widow to a brother or show that he was not making sense about heaven.

But Jesus said:

And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

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

We might wonder why he chose this somewhat strange example when it is really quite subtle and there are many other more obvious verses. It’s possibly because the Sadducees preferred the Books of Moses, so he was quoting back to them their own sources.

What about us, what do we think about life after death?  And Resurrection. We all do think about it, but we don’t express it out loud very much. with.

I always used to say to students that death is an edge over which we cannot see. Sometimes the more speculation there is, the harder it is to believe. IT is easy to make it absurd as the Sadducees do in today’s reading.

But there is something distinctive about Christian faith, and it is the fleshed-out idea of resurrection. It is a part of our Christian DNA that we believe in the resurrection, because we are centred on the life of Jesus. And Jesus did resurrection and he talked resurrection.

But what does resurrection mean?  Confusingly, there are Christians, like our most famous theologian, Lloyd Geering, who do not believe in life after death. Geering is defying death in other ways. He has outlived three wives and he is now 107. He was one of the last people in the world to have a heresy trial, way back in the twentieth century.

Is there Continuity of being. Or does resurrection mean being put back together at the last judgment? Or is it just a metaphor for new life and new directions? So many different ways of thinking hide under the label resurrection. And there are so many verses about judgment and resurrection and heaven that are frankly impossible to reconcile in any coherent way.

But when I used to say to students that death is an edge over which we can’t see. I didn’t mean that there was nothing there. I meant that it would be more in content and perception and experience than we can possibly imagine. In particular we can’t paint a picture like Dante’s hell or heaven. We can’t say this is what it will be like. We can’t speculate about exactly what happens at the moment of death, and where the judgment happens or how. And notice that every time disciples try to pin Jesus down he is very elusive. We will be like angels. We will be children of the resurrection. That doesn’t tell us very much, except that there will be something.

Paul says, Death has a sting. I think this is because it is an edge.

We truly are like the caterpillar that cannot imagine being a butterfly, but we have a sense that our cocoon is not the end.

At the same time, death is the ever-present limit in every thought and action

There is a paradox around death. If we do nothing but concentrate on it, we lose the ability to live.

But if we ignore it we don’t give it it’s true importance.

IT is there at every juncture, every waking, every relationship. It is the texture of every loss, every estrangement, every misunderstanding, every joy.

At some point we will all have felt the deep weight of the implausibility of life after death.

I felt that very young. I was eleven.

I came back to faith later, only after I had tasted the even greater implausibility of our being here at all. And you can feel the same way about the universe, and every cell, and every element.

As the physicist Heisenberg said:

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

Recognising that doesn’t mean we always feel it though. We live in a very very secular culture. What we are doing here, debating the finer points of resurrection, is very odd. IT is so odd that it is easy to feel lonely.

A philosopher, Charles Taylor wrote a book called A Secular Age. There he talks about the way in which in the fifteenth century, you could disbelieve in God but the whole weight of the society, its church life, sacraments, holy water, relics, prayers, incense, holiness, angelus bells, and so on, weighted in the direction of God and eternity. And of course, life was more perilous in some ways. Death was ever present.

The same is true of Jesus’ day. We aren’t the first people to find life after death implausible, but we are the first generations to find our culture reinforcing this stance at every turn.

We are the first generations to think we have exhaustive knowledge about every nook and cranny of the universe…even the stars aren’t mysterious and full of magic as they used to be.

In the nineteenth century people thought that education and civilization with a bit of religion would make us all better and we would enter a time of peace and happiness. Instead, we had the twentieth century. We are a part of the disillusioned generations. We wonder ,where was God when all of that was happening in Christian countries.

Given all of that it is a miracle than any of us are here at all, even if we wobble sometimes about the Resurrection. Even if we try to hide our strangeness and fit in if we can.

And I don’t know what it is like in the circles you all hang out in, but one-way theologians try to fit in is by trying to discard too much talk about spirit and soul

They say, this is just an outdated Greek way of separating the person.

They say it is unecological because it leads to an emphasis on spirit rather than physical matter

Or that it is more scientific because we are not saying there is anything they can’t study.

If anyone stops to ask well what about death, they say well God will remember us and raise us up at the last day. That could be tomorrow, or a hundred years or billions of years in the future.

So, you can see that we all get ourselves in a tizzy trying to work all this out.

This stance, of the body is us, does help us fit in, it makes us less threatening, but I think it erodes away any sense of coherence of an afterlife really. Our common position is edging closer and closer to the Sadducees.

In this country, Māori who are acknowledged to carry with them into the modern culture a much deeper sense of depth and mystery and wairua in nature do not de-emphasise the body. A deeply ecological approach to life is compatible with spirit language.

I think we have to hold on to the old language.

We are spirit creatures

But we are also embodied.

There is something absolutely incredible about matter.

We know that angels envy us. they don’t know what chocolate tastes like, or what water feels like. Or human love.

God joined us in this matter –and we are about to enter a time of great expectation and anticipation about the coming of God to be with us, in spirit and in body.

Death is an edge over which we cannot see, but we do have glimpses.

What distinguishes Christianity from other religions is the embodied-ness of this afterlife,

Jesus eating and breaking bread in his spirit body is a glimpse. Being taken up into the seventh heaven like Paul is a glimpse. The images of restoration in the Bible are glimpses and foreshadowings. The lamb lying down with the wolf is a glimpse.

Jesus said to the thief on the cross: Today you will be with me in paradise. Another glimpse.

There is a lot more to the story of course. The meaning of Jesus coming and what it means to be saved. But that is all for another day, or for theology group.

But we are entering the season of Christmas and Handel’s Messiah and it is good to end with these stirring words which have echoed down through the ages from Job and the Hebrew Scriptures:

For I know that my Redeemer lives and that in the end he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been destroyed, and worms destroy my body, then in my flesh I shall see God,

IT is amazing every year to see a town hall full of mostly unbelievers deeply moved by Handel’s aria. There is something they recognise in it, a truth, a source of something to hope for, even if they can’t articulate it. I would recommend it to everyone.