God of The Living

For the past two weeks I have been immersed in contemplation of one simple, straightforward passage in the Gospel of Mark. Jesus is in the temple the week before his execution, interacting with Sadducees who tried to trick him into an explanation of what happens to a woman who was married to seven brothers, each of whom died leaving the next brother to marry her in the levirate tradition because she was childless. Not believing in resurrection, the Sadducees ask, “in the resurrection, whose wife will she be?”

Jesus berates them for their failure to understand either Scripture or the power of God. He asserts simply that when they rise from the dead, they don’t marry because they are like angels in heaven. Then further, “And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead, but of the living; you are quite wrong.” (Mk. 12: 26:27) The reference to Exodus 3:15 is Jesus’ way of stating matter-of-factly that your ancestors who have died are alive with God.

This story told by Mark in his gospel also appears in the other two synoptic gospels (Mt. 22:23-33 and Lk. 20:27-40). Commentators have slightly different interpretations and emphases. Jesus is speaking of immortality more than resurrection. Jesus is forecasting his own resurrection. Paul had his own take on the matter which he detailed in Chapter 15 of his first letter to the Corinthians.

I wonder though, in our efforts to describe the fine points of Jesus’ message in this passage, do we miss the essence? What struck me was Jesus’ simply matter-of-fact manner as though he were teaching a well known math axiom to young children. “You don’t understand Scripture, nor do you understand the power of God. Look, when you go to heaven you are like the angels. You know about angels, right? Everybody knows about angels. You are alive with God. Didn’t God tell Moses that?” Jesus’ simple response brought the heavenly and spiritual reality into the mundane.

Have I been missing something all these years? Is the reality of eternal life so obvious as a matter of history as well as faith? Jesus seemed to think so. Yet while the reality of eternal life with God is fully grounded in Jewish faith and the history of the Israelites, there is scant mention in Scripture. In the early days, Enoch “walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him.” (Gen. 5:24) Centuries later, God took Elijah up in a whirlwind before many witnesses (2Kgs. 2:11). And in the time of torture in the second century BCE, it was recorded that those of faith “believe that they, like our patriarchs Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, do not die to God, but live to God.” (4 Macc. 7:19). In addition, Jesus had, by the power of God, resurrected Lazarus from the dead (Jn. 11: 38-44), and had brought back to life Jairus’s daughter (Mk. 5: 35-43) and a widow’s son (Lk. 7:11-15). The power of God can bring us from death to life, from life to heaven uncorrupted (Enoch, Elijah, Jesus) or out of our body in death to an eternal existence with God to be revealed to us as we pass through the veil.

So, if eternal life is so well grounded in Israelite tradition and faith, how does one account for the fact that this reality is not more present in Scripture? Did the law and Jewish religious structure make attainment of eternal life with God seem unattainable? And what of the church? Some thoughts on these questions next week.