Saturday, a day of darkness, of fear, a day of wondering who Christ really is, if anything he said was true. We live here, caught somewhere between Good Friday and Easter morning. As Anne Lamott says in Traveling Mercies, Plan B, we are Easter people living in a Good Friday world.
We know now, unlike the first disciples, that Christ did rise on Easter morning. He has made all things new. But what does that mean to us? How does it affect our lives today?
In Luke 20:27-38, Christ was asked by a group of religious leaders, the Sadducees, how the resurrection worked. They were hoping it wasn’t really true, that it couldn’t happen in the midst of all the complexities of daily life. Christ answers that the resurrection is not something vague that might have an impact sometime in the future, but that it is real, is here, now.
Walter Brueggemann, Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, writes the following in his book “The Threat of Life – Sermons on Pain, Power, and Weakness” :
Resurrection is dangerous business. It is not just about the dead person being resuscitated. It is about God’s power for life that moves into all our arrangements, shatters all our categories by which we manage, control, and administer. It speaks about God’s will for new life working where we thought our tired deathliness would prevail. And the Sadducees plead: Please tell us that such dangerous life will not come among us.
Jesus’ answer is more massive, more radical, more dangerous than they had imagined. Of all things, he refers to the burning bush of Exodus 3 to say, You can see already there that Moses believes in the resurrection because God there refers back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jesus is saying, I can play your silly Bible games and I can out-Bible you, and I am on the side of Moses. Now that is a doubtful argument, but it is adequate to get the conversation started. But then Jesus moves on past such empty Bible quoting (because all of us can quote the Bible any way we want). Jesus refuses to engage in their tricky reasoning and will not participate in a numbers game about one wife and seven husbands. What he tells them is that the power of the resurrection is so massive, so overwhelming, so utterly new, so beyond our categories, that we are not going to discuss this numbers game; it is all irrelevant. In that new age, when the rule of God breaks through, all the categories through which we try to explain and control life and keep it in tow for our purposes are simply pushed aside. Because all our posturing to keep it under control breathes the air of death and finally kills and cheapens and mocks the power of life.
Then he shifts the subject. If you want to talk about Moses and Torah and marriages and one and seven and husbands, and all of that, you can, but I will not linger there. He quickly dismisses all this and he speaks about God whom he knows so well and whom we confess he embodies. Of course there is a resurrection. Of course there is a coming new age. Of course the power for life will prevail. Of course the world will not fit into our little categories. And this is true, not because of magic or tradition or Torah. It is true because of the character and purpose and faithfulness of God who will make all things new. He then delivers the central message:
Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living;
For all live to him.He is the power of life in the midst of a world bent on death.
In that moment all the cunning questions of the Sadducees are nullified. And the story ends with the scribes saying, “Teacher, you have spoken well. For they no longer dared to ask him a question.” We are there at the center of things and the Sadducees could sense it. We are at the main truth of God. God wills life. God has power for life. God will work life among us. All our political, moral, theological tinkering around the edges does not touch the main truth of God that God gives new life which shatters all our ways of control. We are here at the main truth of our own life. The God of life wills life for us. You see, Jesus refuses to let the resurrection be carried off into future speculation. It concerns us here and now. It concerns our readiness to receive new life. We become aware, as did the contemporaries of Jesus, that with Jesus we are placed in crisis with all the old patterns of death we so much cherish but which day by day are killing us.Take another sniff of Jesus. What smelled like threat, if we pay attention, smells like new possibility. What we sense to be a deep shattering can also be a beginning again. The power of God for life, the power of the resurrection is the breaking of the vicious cycles of death. It is so in our world, where we live under the threat of nuclear death; the power of the resurrection among us is at work against that insanity. All around us the power of the resurrection is breaking out against oppression, and the old weary categories of bondage, intolerance, and brutality are now called into serious question. The news is that God’s power for life will not be overridden or resisted or defeated. Close to home, the cold despair of our deathliness will be overcome. God will have God’s say.