In my lectio divina today (November 3, 2016) on Luke
20:27-38 (Jesus’ response to the Sadducees about the resurrection), I
recognized that in his response (vv. 37-38) about how God self-identified to
Moses at the burning bush as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Jesus was
saying more about God than about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God is the God of
the living, not the dead. I suppose for humans to be concerned about their
personal resurrection is natural, which I sense that 20th and 21st century
Christians in the West have distorted with our cultural emphasis on
individualism. But Jesus concluded by saying that to God all of them are
alive. Jesus’ focus is on God’s living eternality, of which the lives of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob are a subsidiary product.
Not just in our extreme cultural individualism, but in
our universal human finitude, at best we imagine God’s eternality and an
endless extension of our measured lives. Even describing God as beyond time,
thus both past and future are eternally present to God, arises from trying to
explain a mystery in terms of how we experience time. I certainly have no
illusions of coming up with something better, only to say that meditating on
how Jesus described God’s living eternality prompted me to look beyond what I
might imagine or anticipate after my earthly death to gaze unswervingly at God
whose living eternality is incomprehensible to me. Is not the point of worship
to relinquish our self-focus to be swallowed in the presence of God by the Holy
Spirit?
Perhaps driving funeral cars the last year and a half has
sharpened my awareness of mortality in fresh ways, though as a pastor who has
conducted plenty of funerals and as one who grew up in the home of an
undertaker, death has been a constant in my awareness as long as I can
remember. It plays a role in the three (still unpublished) novels I have
written and in the collection of true vignettes I have assembled into a
manuscript called “Ripples” that is on its way to publication.
Especially during this time of witnessing a wide variety of
funerals, I have been aware of a lot of silly, superficial things pastors and
others say to grieving people with the intent of comfort. I myself know that a
funeral meditation is not the place for exposing people to the theological
nuances of the intermediate state and the ultimate hope of resurrection to
eternal life, but I cringe, suspecting that some of these prove impotent to
offer enduring comfort. But more to my immediate point, as I have explored
mortality and the biblical hope of resurrection, the less satisfying I find our
human, even Christian, constructs of what to expect after death.
The biblical imagery, which is almost entirely in the New
Testament, is clearly metaphorical language not intended to be taken literally
(streets pure as gold, for example), but rather are intended to evoke hope and
joy, courage and anticipation, especially in circumstances that tend to shake
our faith. Taken as a composite, a sort of mosaic, I suggest they do not
describe what our experience after this life will be like but rather are
intended to draw our focus into the God of the living with such power we can escape
the hold our present lives have on us so that we can be propelled into the
presence of the God of the living, accepting a mystery that is beyond us,
without regret for what we may fear losing in the here and now. The real
question is not “what will I experience when I die?” but “How wonderful is the
God of the living?”
