Appropriately enough at this time of the year, we find ourselves dwelling on death, and not just because of the alarm waking us to dark, dank mornings. In the Church calendar this is the month in which we pray especially for the Holy Souls; and we’ve celebrated last week All Saints and All Souls, echoed this week by the same feasts in the Dominican calendar – for all the saints of the Order of Preachers, and the Commemoration of our deceased brothers and sisters (more out of specific gratitude than general insecurity, I think). The secular calendar for once keeps time with us, with the ceremonies of Remembrance Sunday linked to the 11th November, the day the armistice was signed which ended the First World War, when we remember all those who have fallen in war and conflicts, combatants or not. All this can seem bleak. We might find ourselves prone to a sense of futility, even despair, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth finding life to be ‘the way to dusty death’; as Schubert’s winter traveller, in the first song of Winterreise, realising that he ‘… cannot choose the time/For my journey;/I must find my own way/In this darkness’; for we too will die. But we should not grieve over our deaths, or for those we know who have died, Paul insists (1 Thess. 4: 13), as others do who have no hope. For our hope is founded on the risen Christ.
This side of two thousand-odd years of well-intended pious platitudes it can be difficult for us to appreciate just how audacious that hope is. After all, the ancient world’s take on life after death ranged from our being remembered by our successors through being (more subjectively) ineffectual ghosts haunting a gray netherworld (Hades, Sheol) to sleeping the long night on and on – hardly that much to hope for. Yet we can read the Old Testament as foreshadowing Christ’s resurrection. Many texts wrestle with how the wicked seem to prosper and the just suffer; but the hope for vindication by God remained. For example, in the Wisdom literature, Job – a fictional character who embodies the problem of innocent suffering – asserts his hope in ultimate vindication by God: ‘For I know that my Redeemer lives, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth … and in my flesh I shall see my God'. Throughout the long years of the Covenant God's people had become convinced of his justice, his love and care for the poor and oppressed. In his love he often showed mercy, going beyond justice and forgiving sins - but he would not be unjust, would not fail to vindicate his friends. From this slowly-dawning conviction of God’s faithfulness comes the hope that God’s love extends beyond this life – for all life is God’s gift, and God will raise his friends to new life. We can see that hope expressed in the story of the torture of the Maccabees by the pagan Greeks and in the psalms.
So some of the Jews, when God came among them as Jesus, had some concept of a life beyond this present one, of life with God. Others, like the Sadducees, did not. Josephus tells us Sadducees were urban aristocrats, conservative in their beliefs (they accepted only the first five books of the Jewish scriptures, the Torah, not the Prophets or Wisdom writings or late works like the books of the Maccabees). Their query to Jesus about the woman married to seven brothers is no genuine seeking of knowledge, since it assumes what in fact they explicitly deny, life after death. Jesus makes a case for the resurrection based on the account of Moses’ experience at the burning bush. The declaration that ‘I am the God’ of patriarchs who have died means that in some sense they still live; ‘for to him all of them are alive’. The proof of resurrection, then, is the living God. Resurrection is our standing in the sight of God, being part of God’s life, God’s future, but this is not merely an extension of our present existence, it involves a radical change. Resurrection entails transformation: our transformation into members of the Body of Christ, dying with him so that we can be raised with him. And that transformation begins now, as we begin to live in the Spirit of God, in justice, faithfulness and hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment