How Like a God
The idea of a Resurrection is sort of a funny notion.
In the ancient world, understandings of death were fairly
uniform. There were some folks, materialists, who thought that only the physical,
visible world was real. And there were other folks, spiritualists, who thought that only the spiritual, invisible world was real. But between these two
extremes, most everyone believed that human beings consisted of both a body and
a soul. When we died, our bodies returned to the earth and our souls descended
to the underworld. There were some variations on the theme—Egyptians, for
example, were afraid that if the body wasn’t preserved the soul would rot away
as well—but on the whole the spirits of the dead spent a shadowy afterlife
wishing that they were alive again.
You can see this belief early on in the Bible. Abraham, for
example, is primarily worried not about the underworld but about children. They believe the living are
more important than the dead, so the way that Abraham and Sarah hope to live on
beyond the grave is through their family. They want kids and grandkids and
great-grandkids; for them, that is their afterlife and that is their heaven. That’s
why Abraham is so concerned with having a son as he and Sarah grow old.
We know that the great figures of the Old Testament believed
in a spiritual life after death, as for example when King David loses his
infant son. David’s attendants are baffled because the king mourns and wails
while his son is sick, yet gets up and goes about his business as soon as the
child has died. David explains that his son cannot come back to him, but one
day he will go to see his son. They will met again in Sheol—which is the Hebrew word for underworld. There is as yet no concept, mind you, of righteous souls
going to Heaven. Heaven is the domain of God and His angels, no place for human
beings. People belong under the ground, and that’s where we go when we die, for
good or for ill.
Now as time marches on in the ancient world, the Hebrews and
Greeks both grow more concerned with the spiritual afterlife. They still want
to live on in the world through their children, of course, but they aren’t simply
dismissing the underworld as an afterthought anymore. And so the geography of
Hades becomes more complex. Yes, for the most part it’s still a boring shadow
of real life, they maintain. But if you were really something special in life—a
great hero amongst the Greeks, say, or a particularly righteous and God-fearing
man amongst the Jews—then you get to settle in the more upscale part of the
underworld, the nice neighborhood. This is Elysium for Greeks and the Bosom of
Abraham for the Old Testament.
Not surprisingly, if it came to be understood that good and
noble souls gain the nice part of Hades, then particularly cruel souls should
get a worse part. That’s only fair. So Greeks begin to talk about Tartarus,
which is not so much part of the underworld as it is the underworld beneath the underworld, home to giants
and demons and particularly nasty sinners. Hebrews call it Gehenna, or
sometimes the Abyss. This division of the underworld comes about in response to
a deepening concern for divine justice amongst both Jews and pagan Gentiles.
Then something bizarre happens. When the Jews are taken into
Exile—that is, when the Jews lose their homeland of Israel and are scattered
into foreign countries—God sends prophets who begin to reveal strange and
wondrous new promises concerning a coming Savior and the Resurrection He would
bring. Resurrection is a uniquely Jewish concept. It doesn’t mean that you live
on happily underground, having done well for yourself in the afterlife. What it
means is that your body actually comes back to life here—rises from the dead—and
is perfectly reunited with your soul, never to die again.
We heard some of this from the prophet Job this morning,
when he wrote: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at last He will stand
upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I
shall see God.” In the flesh, after death! Now, this isn’t some undead
afterlife. We don’t need any wisecracks about zombies. What it means is a
return to a fullness of life unlike any we’ve known before, perhaps not even in
the Garden of Eden. Crazy, right?
The Resurrection is kind of a crazy idea. And it was just as
crazy back when the prophets first started preaching it as it is today. What
would life after the Resurrection be like? Our lives are so shaped by sickness,
aging, weakness and death that it’s almost impossible to imagine living without
those things and still being human. I mean, do we still eat after the Resurrection? Do we sweat? Do we have to use the
toilet? Do we still have romantic relationships with our spouses? How does it
all work?
These are the sorts of nitty-gritty questions raised in our
Gospel this morning, when a group of Sadducees interrogate Jesus about life in
the age to come. While most Jews in the time of Jesus believed in and hoped for
the Resurrection, the Sadducees rejected the prophets and denied that the dead
would rise. “How would it work?” they want to know. “If a woman had seven
husbands who lived and died during her lifetime, which would be her husband
once they were all risen and alive again?”
But Jesus insists that life in the age to come is more
wondrous and more alien than anything we can imagine in this age. We won’t be
disembodied spirits floating around without any physicality, but neither will
the Resurrection just be more of the same. In other words, don’t expect Heaven
to be business as usual. There will come a time, He promises, when God will
return to earth and the souls of the righteous dead will reunite with their bodies.
Then there will be a new Heaven and a new earth because they will both be one: Heaven
will be as one with the earth because God will be as one with Man.
What will that be like? I’m sure I couldn’t tell you. But we
may have some hints!
Back in the Middle Ages, the great scholastics of the Church
were masters at synthesizing knowledge into a unified whole. They started with
Jesus Christ, and the framework of Christian truth revealed in Him. Then they
wove onto that frame the riches of Jewish and Muslim tradition, along with
Greek philosophy and Roman law. Into this they incorporated the glimmers of
truth present in pagan mythologies: Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Celtic, Slavic,
Viking. And they took all this into account when imagining the life of the
world to come.
St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of medieval scholastics and
philosophers, spoke of our bodies after the Resurrection as possessing four new
qualities. He called them impassibility, clarity, agility, and subtlety. Now,
impassibility means that we won’t grow old or sick or die. Clarity means that
our bodies will be perfected, without blemish or flaw or anything unhealthy.
Agility means that we will be fast and strong far beyond any mortal strength. And
subtlety means that we will have such perfect spiritual control over our bodies
that we will be able to pass through physical objects and even appear—teleport!—wherever
we want. How did Aquinas come up with that last one? Because that’s what Jesus
was able to do after He rose from the dead in His Body.
If this all sounds familiar, it well ought. Aquinas has
described, in essence, the superpowers of our superheroes—Spider-Man, Superman,
Captain America. Moreover, he is describing the way that pagan peoples thought
of their gods: strong, fast, ageless, impervious to harm. Indeed, the gods of
old were not so much beyond humanity
as they were more human than we are. Pagans didn’t worship their gods so much
as want to be them, the way we want
to be celebrities or stars. The myths of old, with their strange and uniquely
human desire to be more than what we are, seem to be echoes of memories of what
we were always meant to be. Perhaps we were like gods in the Garden, before sin
and death entered the world. Or perhaps these are the divine gifts that come only
with perfect union in Christ.
Let us keep that in mind when we watch such Christianized
myths as Thor or The Hobbit in theaters. These movies embody our longings for
Resurrection!
Like our forebears, we live in anticipation of the
Resurrection, looking forward to the day when sin and death will be no more, when
every suffering will be relieved and every injustice healed. Unlike our
forebears, we have the astonishing gift of having witnessed the coming of the
Messiah, His conquest of the underworld, and the Easter Resurrection already
begun in Him. Because of the Cross, the souls of the faithful now dwell with
God in Heaven, where they, like us, await the End of the Age. And because of Christ’s
Resurrection, we know that both this world visible and that one invisible have
a glorious and reunited future.
How exactly will the Resurrection work? I couldn’t say. But
it is going to be amazing.
Thanks be to Christ, Who raises us body and soul. In Jesus’
Name. AMEN.
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