The God of the Living

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 20^th and 21^st 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 It plays a role in the three (still unpublished) novels I have written and in the collection of true vignettes I have assembled into a manuscript called “Ripples” that is on its way to publication.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?”