Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
Proper 27 C - November 6, 2022
The Epistle’s basic story of good winning out over evil and of God and Satan set in opposition includes a decisive confrontation littered with enigmatic persons and forces. The promise is that evil will be defeated. The Thessalonians lived in a time, not unlike our own, of heightened expectation that the end of the world, at least as they knew it, would be coming soon. They were worked up into an apocalyptic frenzy which was splintering the community. The writer is trying to calm them down, refocus their attention, clarify some misconceptions about the return of Christ, and the way in which they should wait together for that return. Gratitude and encouragement are the antidotes to their fear-based hysteria. He reminds them and us of our common calling to be sons and daughters of God and of our inheritance in the glory of Christ.
Haggai, one of three post-exilic prophets, arose in Judah after Persia became the dominant power in the Near East (539 BCE), and the Jews were permitted to return to their homeland. Amid utter despair this small remnant hears a gracious word of affirmation. The divine call to rebuild the temple is a call to commitment and relationship to God. Haggai addresses their concern by assuring them that God is with them and will provide what the people need for rebuilding the temple. They, however, became preoccupied with rebuilding their own houses and Haggai reminds them that they are not in this as individuals but are called and sustained as a community. The community exists for the sake of its members. Growth in holiness is a journey in community.
Both lessons remind us that we live in and through one another. We become ourselves only through a process of mutual becoming. It begins in God’s own creative, self-giving love. Our core identity rests in the divine Love that birthed us all. We are all one, all loved corporately by and in God. We are saved not by being privately perfect, but by being part of the whole, part of the Body that is Christ. This echoes the biblical concept of a covenant love granted to the Jewish people, and never just to one individual.
This awareness of reality upends so many of our current obsessions about private worthiness, reward and punishment, gender, race, class distinctions, and possessions. The Gospel message is about learning to live and die together in and with God. The good news is that God is saving and redeeming the Whole first and foremost, and we are all caught up in it. We are the blessed beneficiaries, the partly willing participants in the Whole. Mature religion is meant to realign what our egos and survival instincts have put asunder, namely the fundamental wholeness at the heart of everything. The source of our disease and violence is separation from parts of ourselves, from each other, and from God. The early Church understood overcoming divisions as part of its mandate, emphasizing connectedness and oneness in Christ.
Throughout history we humans have had a strong appreciation for and connection with our ancestors. The notion of oneness is what Christians were trying to verbalize when they made a late addition to the ancient Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the communion of saints.” The feast of All Saints entered the Christian tradition in the 4th century with a focus on relation and remembrance, offering us the idea that the dead are at one with the living.
With this in mind, we turn to Luke’s passage. The Sadducees, the wealthy elite, denied life after death. In this passage they set an intellectual trap for Jesus hoping to show that his teaching about the resurrection of the dead was absurd. Their imaginary scenario about the woman consecutively marrying seven brothers in levirate marriage (Gen. 38:8) is intended to make fun of Jesus. Wealth, power, and prestige insulated them from the pain implied in this tawdry tale of a woman passed from one brother to another. The question they pose has to do with ownership and marital rights. Jesus takes them seriously and makes the basic point that things don’t work in heaven the way they do on earth. Eternal life is not simply a continuation of this life. Although death is the end of many things, it is not the end of God.
When Jesus says: “God is not a God of the dead.” He isn’t saying that God is indifferent toward the dead or that God has forgotten them. God’s love for us is eternal. In compassionate love the dead are drawn into God’s heart. As they were, so now they are in God, healed and whole. In heaven all are children of the resurrection. All who lived before us and are now not among us are living in God. Because of that connection to God, they are not dead to us. They still speak today. We are today together with them because God is not the God of the dead but of the living. This kind of mutual interdependence I have sensed to be true with the death of those closest to me. Anyone acquainted with the poignancy of love that lives on after our loved one dies, will recognize this as we read the story of our lives through the lens of the resurrection.
When Jesus speaks of the God of the living, he is naming the God of newness, forgiveness, and liberation. He does not answer our many questions about the resurrection or provide a road map of the new creation, though one of our fond illusions is that he should. Jesus teaches us how to walk through this great mystery and to trust that God is on the other side of it. When we consider ourselves to be part of a continuum of life that does not end with death, but transitions to a life after life, our perspective changes. Jesus points us to a God whose faithfulness is immeasurable and inexhaustible. In that faithfulness we find enough to endure all that life and death will ask of us.
In our day it’s easy to become disillusioned, fearful, and self-absorbed as the Israelite remnant and the Thessalonian Christians did. It’s easy to lose hope. To think of the past as a better time than the present seems to be a common human tendency. The move into the future is not just a repeat of the past and a faint echo of former glory. In God’s future we are moving toward and co-creating a surge of wonder, grace, beauty, and love. Our God is a God who makes a way when there is no way. As Christians we are shaped by more than our experiences; we are shaped by our hopes, by the future and convictions into which we are living and dying. Hope is best lived within a hopeful community, in the company of the saints, living and departed. In such company we find comfort and courage as we face the future together.
+Amen.
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