Homily 2 - life after death

You might describe the marriage between my wife Therese and me as a love match.  We got married because we dated, and then fell in love, and then decided that we wanted to be married – and then we got married. 

That story obviously is important to Therese and me, but it may not sound that interesting to you, because there is nothing that is particularly unusual about it.  Marrying for love, by mutual consent, is our culture’s ideal – you might call it our culture’s norm.

But that hasn’t been the way that marriage has worked in all places and times. 

I once worked with a woman who is in an arranged marriage.  She is of Indian heritage, although she is not from India herself.  Her parents had immigrated to the UK, and this co-worker grew up in London.  But her family still had strong ties to the old country, and so when she reached the age to marry, her family arranged with another family in India for her to marry a young man from that other family.  I asked her, “Were you allowed to have any say in the matter?”  “Yes,” she replied.  The families set up a time for the couple to meet, and they were given a great deal of time to spend together to determine whether it would work for them.  They both agreed to go forward with the marriage, and as of the last time I spoke with her, she was happily married with several children.

Arranged marriages have been the norm in many times, places and cultures.  If you have ever seen the great musical, “Fiddler on the Roof”, you know that the conflict between arranged marriage and marriage for love is one of the major themes of the play.  Tevye and his wife sing a poignant duet called, “Do You Love Me?”  They are in an arranged marriage, and they come to realize, 25 years after their wedding day, that they have grown to love one another.

There was a financial and transactional aspect about these arranged marriages; and they were of high social importance, because they brought about the alliance between two families.  This was true of marriages among kings and nobles, and it was true of marriages among the poor dairymen, butchers and tailors in the shtetls of Russia and Ukraine.

I mention these items about arranged marriages because such marriages would have been common in biblical times.  It gives us a context for understanding Jesus’s words today, that those deemed worthy to attain to the coming age “neither marry nor are given in marriage”.  That phrase “given in marriage” may allude to arranged marriages, in which a father exchanged his daughter for a dowry from the groom’s family.  In a sense, he sold her to another family, to be wed to one of the sons of the family.  Love may have had very little to do with it.  It’s possible that there were women who heard Jesus speak that day who, upon hearing that life after the resurrection didn’t include arranged marriages, would have sighed with relief.

I offer these reflections on arranged marriages to help cast a bit of light on these strange and powerful words today from Jesus, teaching us about our life which is to come after we rise from the dead. 

We will rise from the dead.  It’s an important article of our faith, but what does it really mean? What is in store for us?  One way to understand what a thing is like is to contrast it with other things that are different.  This morning, I’d like to contrast our belief in the resurrection of the dead with two other, rival sets of belief: the belief that there is nothing after we die; and the belief that we live over and over again via reincarnation. 

Of course, there are many people, perhaps even some people who are here with us today, who think that our existence ends when we die; that there is nothing that comes afterward; that we won’t rise from the dead someday.  That is what the Sadducees from today’s Gospel reading thought.  It’s why they posed to Jesus that seemingly ridiculous question about the wife who marries seven brothers in succession.  Their question was meant to illustrate the alleged absurdity of rising from the dead.  But their question wouldn’t have sounded ridiculous to someone steeped in Torah, the Law; the book of Deuteronomy, one of the books of the Law, mandates that when a husband dies childless, his brother must marry the widow.  There was a certain wisdom and even kindness in that law, which sounds so strange to us today: it provided for the care of the widow, whose prospects may otherwise have been very precarious without a husband to care for her. 

The same law from Deuteronomy also required that any children who came from the union of the widow and her dead husband’s brother would bear the name, not of the new husband, but of his dead brother.  That way, the dead brother’s name would be perpetuated.  To those who don’t believe in the resurrection from the dead, this is the sort of thing that stands in for our longing for eternal life: that one lives on in the name of one’s descendants, or in the memory of those who remember him.    

But we learn from Jesus’s discourse today that this view that everything ends at our death is not correct: when we die, we live on, not in the names of our descendants, but in reality.   For us who are blessed to be chosen by God, life after death isn’t some just some metaphor of memory or descendants’ names; our life after death is real.  Our life continues, through and after a resurrection brought about by the power and love of God, which even death is not able to overcome.

Another common alternative to our belief in the resurrection is a belief in reincarnation: the idea that, after we die, our spiritual essence unites with another body here on earth; when that new body dies, our spiritual essence does the same thing again, and again, and thus there is a continuing cycle of death and rebirth in this life here on earth. 

As it happens, Jesus speaks words today that correct this misconception of reincarnation.  He tells us that we who die and then rise from the dead do not die again.  Once the chains of death have been broken for us, they are broken for good, and will never be imposed upon us again.

So we hold our Christian belief in life after death over against these false ideas: of no life after death, and of reincarnation. But what will our life after the resurrection be like?  It would be wonderful if the bible contained an essay or a textbook on this topic, because I have many questions about this.  Most of all, I’d like to understand, “Will I be able to be with Therese in some way?  Will I be able to be with my children?”  I think there are quite a few people with questions about these sorts of things.  Throughout the New Testament, there are little hints and glimpses offered here and there, including from today’s Gospel passage, but there is quite a bit that we don’t know for certain.  Our fundamental stance must be that we won’t know all there is to know about it until we get there ourselves. 

But … we also might get an idea about our resurrected life just based on what we already know about God. We know that God has been faithful to us, and that he has given us his Son to save us, so we know he loves us very much, and that our destiny is important to him.  Based on that alone, I think we can be confident that what he has in store for us will be wonderful.  I think it will be wonderful beyond our wildest imaginings.

But there is yet another way we can get a glimpse of life beyond death. And that is that God doesn’t just wait for us to arrive there after our deaths.  Like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, rushing out to meet his contrite son, God comes to us, here on earth.  And in doing so, he gives us a foretaste of what is in store for us.  He does this by giving us life in him.  He fills us with his Holy Spirit.  Through his son Jesus, he gives us a sacramental life.  It starts with our baptism and confirmation, and it’s sustained by the bread of life.  Even our marriages reflect in some way the love that God has for us.

So we know that what we have here is not all there is.  Really, this life we’re living now is just our preparation for what is to come.  As we receive the Bread of Life ourselves, let us give thanks that God loves us so much that he has prepared a wonderful life for us, even after we die.