York Minster

A God of the Living

Date: 12th November 2007
Preacher: The Revd Canon Dr Jonathan Draper

The world is full of people who seem to misunderstand some things so thoroughly that they are incapable of seeing how silly they are. In fact there have been several times this week when I have had the privilege of attending meetings with some of these people, though I will not be revealing any details. And in a specifically Christian context, I’m sad to report, this also seems to be the case. For instance, churches seem to be full of people who misunderstand the nature and authority of the Bible so thoroughly that they seem to make it an object of worship; churches seem to be full of people who misunderstand the nature and authority of priesthood equally thoroughly and seem to make ministers a substitute for the authority of God; churches seem to be full of people who misunderstand the nature of Christian doctrine and mistake it for the word of God himself. All of these misunderstandings can be dangerous, though sometimes they lead to strange and slightly bizzare encounters. When I was a young man struggling to break free from a fundamentalist religious context and mindset, I once entered into a sort of argument by post with the editor of an American magazine called Christianity Today. He had written a leading article on the Bible to which I took exception, and with all the enthusiasm of youth I accused him of confusing Jesus as the Word of God with the Bible as a word of God. He, of course, insisted on calling the Bible ‘The Word’ with lots of capital letters. I gave up on the conversation when I got a letter back from him insisting that there are two words of God: Jesus and the Bible. He didn’t quite say it, but he might as well have said that they are also co-equal and co-eternal. I have no idea of the name of the heresy he was committing, but I suspect it was pretty serious.

There is something of the same thing going on in our gospel reading this morning too. The Sadducees, who, it seems, didn’t believe in any kind of resurrection, have obviously twigged that Jesus did. And in order to show him just how absurd a belief it is, they pose him a question about an unfortunate woman whose husbands – all seven of them - die before they can conceive a child. Following both Jewish law and practice, if a woman is widowed and childless it is the responsibility of the deceased husband’s brother to take the widow as his wife so as not to leave her unprotected and socially excluded. These Sadducees conjure a scene where seven brothers all end up marrying the same woman and they want to know how this will be sorted out at some supposed resurrection: whose wife will she be? You can almost see the self-satisfied little smiles on their faces and between them as they put what they thought was a very clever killer question to Jesus. None of them, of course, gave a moment’s thought to the poor woman who may not have wanted all those brothers as husbands anyway.

Jesus is remarkably patient in his reply, which is a quality I seem to be losing as I get older. He tries to get them to see a bigger, and a quite different picture; he tries to draw their minds away from relatively unimportant matters – like whose wife she will be - and to focus instead on more substantial matters. And as Jesus does that, he also tries to do an exceptionally difficult thing by trying to get them to see that the Law of Moses, than which there is nothing greater in Judaism, is not for ever; it is not the final word from God, it is, like every other earthly reality, a penultimate truth. Jesus tries to liberate their minds and hearts, but like so many of us even today it is not liberation that they want, but to be proved right.

The point of this story is not about resurrection, but is about God and the kind of God in which Jesus would have us believe. Not surprisingly Jesus wants the Sadducees in this story to understand God as he does, as a God of the living. Now I suspect these Sadducees would also have thought that they believed in a God of the living, even if they didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead. But I think Jesus is making a more significant point than that, for not only is God the God of the living, he is also a living God. That, too, may seem like a relatively obvious thing to say, and it may even be that the Sadducees thought they believed that too. But Jesus is drawing on the deepest wells of Jewish thinking about God in this encounter in trying to get them to understand that because God is a living God we have a relationship with him, and that in that relationship it is God who matters: all of those things that help us to understand God are of secondary importance. Even the Torah, the law of Moses is of secondary importance; or in a more specifically Christian context we could say, even the Bible, the Church and the sacraments are of secondary importance. The main point is that God is not bound by our understandings, is not contained by our books and our ideas and our ways of worship and spirituality. The main thing is that in God we are set free to have a relationship with him, a relationship that is real and living, a relationship that grows and changes; in God we are set free from every other reality, no matter how valued or precious it might be. ‘Whose wife will she be?’ is simply the wrong sort of question.

The other reason why this is the wrong sort of question is because it shows that these Sadducees have put the law of Moses into the place of God which is, of course, a form of idolatry. They have taken an object which is not God and treated it as if it was God. Whenever we exalt anything in place of God we worship a false god, indeed no god at all. God, as Jesus reminds us, is a living God, and not another object like a book or a people or a law; God is and remains beyond our understanding and imagining and cannot be reduced to our ideas and understandings of him no matter how hallowed, valued or venerable they may be.

There is a final point I’d like to make from this reading which relates to the other great theme of this day, remembrance. As far as these Sadducees were concerned, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, indeed David and Isaiah and Moses himself, were all dead; and yet God is always spoken of in the Jewish traditions as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and so on. Jesus makes the point that though they may be dead from a human point of view, yet they live within the life of God for ever. God is not only not bound by our understandings and ideas, but is also not bound by space and time. All things and all people are simply present to God; no one and no-thing stands outside his love.

This is the great point on which we make our national act of remembrance at this time of year, and all the more personal remembrances we make throughout our lives. God is a God of the living; everyone is held within the life of God; no one is lost. As St Augustine put it 1700 years ago, ‘we can never lose those whom we have loved if we have loved them in God, for we have loved them in the God whom we can never lose.’ Remembrance is no mere remembering; it is a continual process of making present. God is a God of the living, a living God, the God in whom we live and move and have our being. ‘Whose wife will she be?’ really is the wrong sort of question.

Amen.