An Informed Faith

Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question…in the resurrection, whose wife will the woman be? This is the question that the Sadducees pose to Jesus, according the account found in the Gospel set for this Sunday, Luke 20.

A hard question—a trick question, to be sure, crafted by a learned group who wanted to have Jesus floundering, grasping for a firm point, sinking in the quicksand of a belief that they did not share.

I Look up, to the sky

Debate about the afterlife was common in the time of Jesus. Some scoffed at the idea. Others yearned to experience that reality beyond our current reality. God rewarded or punished people in this lifetime. The Sadducees noted that their scripture did not actually refer to a time or place for life after this life; they asserted that there was no “life after death”, so the present was all there is for God to judge people.

The Pharisees disagreed, drawing on a particular interpretation of just a small number of prophetic verses to argue that it was, indeed, in the afterlife that God bestowed his blessings or curses on people, in accordance with their faithfulness.

So, the Pharisees—and the followers of Jesus—taught about the resurrection of the dead, the life after this life, the heavenly realm, the promise that God offers to people of faith, to snatch them out of this life of misery, to take them up in the air to the heavenly realm, where God resides, where true believers are found, where hope is assured.

At least, that is where a traditional understanding of this passage in Luke 20 and the issues takes us. And the same attitudes persist today. What will life be like in the “afterlife”? What will we be doing when we are in the mysterious presence of God into eternity? People still wonder. The hypothetical question of the Sadducees was intended to trip Jesus up. Jesus avoids the trap, jumps over the snare, and focusses attention elsewhere.

The traditional understanding of the world was driven by the ancient Hebrew belief that the world was flat, resting on a set of pillars, there was an abyss of waters, a huge mass of waters under the earth. (See picture)

And in the sky, above the sun, moon and stars, there was a firmament, a dome stretching right across the sky, and above that firmament there was another huge body of water—water which made its way down to the earth when that dome was punctured, water which fell down on people and creatures through the windows in the firmament, and came onto the earth as rain.

Of course, that all made sense to the ancients, who didn’t have the capacity that we have, to see our world from afar, or to measure things off in the distance. A flat earth with a huge domed sky just made perfect sense. That’s precisely what it looked like.

And watching over all this, above the dome, above the waters in the sky, was the heavenly being, God, sovereign lord over the whole creation, safe and secure in his heavenly realm. And that was where faithful believers would end up, after moving beyond this earthly life, into the heavenly realm, to spend eternity with God. Death, for believers, meant ascending into heaven.

Well, that picture of the world, that way of envisaging the reality of our place in the grand scheme of things, does not stand up in the modern world. Driven by the understandings of science, astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, and biology, we have a very different appreciation of the physical realities of this world.

We are not at the centre of the whole creation, as the ancients once thought. We are on just one planet, orbiting around just one sun—one of many planets, orbiting one of many suns. And our planetary system is but one such system in the galaxy we inhabit—one of many, many galaxies, stretching out, not just as far as the eye can see, but as far as we can conceptualise time, and space—light years, that distance which is covered by light travelling in a vacuum in one calendar year, 365.25 days as we measure them.

And we know that we are able to look through our telescopes far off, into the distance, back in time, across hundreds and hundreds of light years, into this magnificently wonderful, complex, inspiring creation, of which we are but a tiny, tiny part.

And in that context, then, the stereotyped image of the stern white-haired bearded ancient of days, seated on a throne amidst the clouds in heaven, surrounded by angels, serenaded by hymns of praise, watching over the saints in heaven who have been saved and the people still labouring on earth—this caricature, this conceptualisation of God and heaven, no longer makes sense.

So I have some questions about what really was meant, when Jesus refers, in the debate, to angels and children of God, being children of the resurrection. Did he have this heavenly realm of angelic creatures firmly in view?

And for us, today: Does this bear any relationship to the way that we visualise the scene, of seven brothers, deceased, but raised to life, in heaven? And does it disturb us, that our current understanding of the world, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe—the whole cosmos—this understanding really has no place? That God in the clouds up there in heaven does not actually make sense? That the Bible, at this point, doesn’t speak to our reality?

II Look down, to your feet

So now, hear this poem, There Are Stones That Sing, which was written by Lisa Jacobson, a contemporary Australian poet and novelist. This was one of the poems offered during the recent Annual Retreat for Ministers and Pastors in the Canberra Region Presbytery. It offers a different perspective, a different understanding, of God and the world.

There Are Stones That Sing

The churches are almost empty or sold,

as if they’ve reached their tipping point,

and from the pulpits, god slid out.

And all that fanciful gold leaf

on heaven’s floor was incinerated

by our telescopes, whose lenses caught it in their scope.

And bits of tattered god fell down.

I’ve heard that âme (‘soul’ in French)

is the name of a wooden chip,

very exposed and vulnerable,

that violin makers insert into

the bodies of their instruments to further enhance the sound.

So maybe that’s where god lives now.

If you ask a priest, he’ll point up.

If you ask black fellas, they’ll point down

to stones that sing

and rivers vibrating underground.

In this poem, Lisa Jacobson reflects, firstly, on the way that science appears to have punctured the traditional Christian view of reality; the fanciful gold leaf on heaven’s floor is incinerated by the piercing gaze of astronomers looking out into distant space through their intensely powerful telescopes. No matter how far they looked, no matter how many millions of light years away, they can see no trace of God sitting on the clouds up in heaven.

So the poet reflects the modernist view that God is an ancient idea which has had its day. God slid out from the churches; bits of tattered god fell down from the floor of heaven, she writes.

It’s a confronting image of the place of religious faith in the contemporary world.

But the part of the poem that really took hold of my imagination, from the first time I heard the poem, through my multiple re-readings of it during the retreat, was the closing section. If you ask where God lives now, she writes;

If you ask a priest, he’ll point up.

If you ask black fellas, they’ll point down

to stones that sing

and rivers vibrating underground.

And that is a stanza that offers a different perspective, a variant understanding, a refreshed imagining of how we encounter God, and where we encounter God. Not, look up, to the heavens; but rather, look down, look at your feet, look past your feet, to the stones—hear them singing? and the rivers—feel them vibrating?

Stones singing and rivers vibrating; that twofold expression of the inner life of the earth is also the key that unlocks a different understanding of God—as a being not remote and removed from humans on earth, but as a being beside us, around us, underneath us, in the earth, in the stones, in the rivers, in our very being.

And this, of course, is rightly acknowledged in this poem, as the insight of black fellas—the centre of spirituality for the First Peoples of this ancient continent. God is in the land, God is in amongst us.

This understanding of where we find God, how we enter the depths of spirituality, is set forth very clearly in the Statement from the Heart, which was made by a representative gathering of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, meeting at Uluru in the heart of the continent, in May 2017.

That Statement refers to a deeply spiritual notion for the First Peoples:

the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors.

This idea is set forth as the basis for the claim that the First Peoples have sovereignty of the land; this link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

But as well as this political claim—sovereignty—there is a spiritual claim. This ancestral tie to the land is what nurtures and grows and sustains the people. Take the people away from their land, and their spirits shrivel, their lives are diminished. Enable the connection between people and land to be maintained, and the people and the land flourish.

III God, not of the dead; God of the living

And so, now, we go back, and read the story told in Luke 20 again—a story of Jesus, debating with the Sadducees, about marriage, relationships, resurrection and the future, a story of debate and discussion.

Yes, there are elements that point very clearly to the ancient Hebraic worldview that saw God as remote, removed, above the clouds, above the sun and moon, beyond the firmament, far away in heaven, where resurrected beings danced as angels.

But alongside that, let us hear the way that Jesus ends the debate, moving away from the future orientation of resurrection life in the time beyond this life, placing the emphasis right back on the present moment: the Lord, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.

Jesus focusses on what is most important. Worry not about God in relation to the dead; focus on the now, on what we do in our lives, on how God is the God of the living. That is the punchline that he provides. That is consistent with what he instructs us to pray: your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven. That is consistent with what he teaches about the kingdom of God: the kingdom of God is among you.

This is consistent with what the psalmist affirms about the earth: the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof. And again, what the psalmist sings: Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures … When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground. Yes, God is here, in the midst of our lives on this earth, in this time and place.

Our God is God of the living. We do not need to wonder where God is, far away from us, high up in the heavens, distant and remote. God is among us. Look down. See the stones. Listen to the rivers. Care for the creation. Nurture life in this world. God is God of the living.