THERE IS RESURRECTION - 2019-11-10 -

Regarding the wonderful world with its blue skies, white clouds, green trees, red roses, wrapped in the sweet melody of Louis Armstrong, it is sorrowful to say, that this world feels sometimes and nowadays, like a boot-camp for most people. In the time of war, lest we forget, it may also cover the definition of hell as well. The wars we fought from the very dawn of humanity, occupy most part of the human history, with some pauses of some eventually recurring armistice.
However the Lord God, in the very beginning, created the world as something very good without a fault and without a flaw. As it is written in the very first chapter of the Book of Genesis, that on the sixth day of the creation, God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
However darkness and evil overshadowed the human life on Earth, thus consequently sickness and death appeared among us as natural phenomena. That is the profound, primordial human experience of leaving the paradise once and for all. All new generations must face this bitter heritage, that at one point we left the Paradise.
HOWEVER there is healing, and the The ultimate healing of sickness and death is the resurrection. But what is it exactly? There should be two different types of resurrection in our mind. The First Type is when somebody had died, but later returned to life because of an intervention, like Jesus raised the 12 years old girl from death or he raised the four days dead Lazarus or when Prophet Elisha raised a boy, or even when the Apostle Paul awakened a young man from death, called Eutychus.
In all cases the soul left the body, but because of an intervention the soul returned to the body. In the popular view, anything like this is impossible to ever occur like for the soul to return to the body, however it happened many times in the history that somebody came back from the other side. The second type is the general resurrection, when the human nation will be healed from the ultimate sickness, which is death. It will happen when the whole universe goes through a transformation, called the Day of God, described by the Apostle Peter:
“Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwells righteousness.”
The Bible definitely says that there is resurrection. The question is that how can we know it, for sure. Many people have their personal doubts. Professor Werner Heisenberg, regarding quantum physics, invented the uncertainty principle, that everything is uncertain in the universe, at least in subatomic level. Meanwhile Albert Einstein asserts in the theory of relativity that even what we are supposed to really know, those facts are really unbelievably flexible and everything is a subject of relativity.
However we, the people of faith, we have a very simple answer for this ancient and pivotal question concerning resurrection. Our answer is that simple that there is resurrection, because Jesus says so. We trust Jesus, and that is why we not only believe that resurrection must be a part of the universe, but we know it with certainty. Moreover Jesus said himself that I am the resurrection and life.
We can take it as granted that there is some kind of resurrection all around, the real question is that what it is like.
AND exactly that was the question of the Sadducees to Jesus. The HOW, will it happen, especially when it looks impossible. The Sadducees were the priestly clans, they had similar views to the Greek regarding the all-shadowy existence of the souls in the afterlife.
They did not believe in the resurrection. They asked a question from Jesus to embarrass him. They thought that they knew the answer already. They thought that nobody can answer their tricky question. They wanted to mock Jesus and everybody else in the community who believed in resurrection. They practically said with their question that who can be that silly, uneducated, unprogressive person to take resurrection seriously and not as a fairy tale probably originated as a Persian myth invented by their Persian prophet Zoroaster around the time when Israel was born sometime between the second and first millennia BCE.
To make a point they made up the paradox puzzle of the woman with seven husbands.
Their point was based on the so called levirate marriage prescribed in the Law of Moses.
Whenever a husband dies childless, his brother must marry the widow in order to preserve the family line of the brother. There were also sound economic reasoning behind the law for sure, however keeping the clan lines intact was also an important factor.
So the made up story was that the woman had seven consecutive husband, because the first husband had six brothers, and in a row all died childless, and except the first one, the other six was obligated to marry the widow.
This does not sound as real life, more likely than not, that it never happened in the history. The question is absurd, it was intended to embarrass Jesus to show that behold, even the superior teacher of the Apostles is not able to answer it, as nobody should know what is going to happen after we die, or how will the general resurrection happen.
If we go along with the trick, we can ask, that which husband should claim the woman as his wife at the time of the general resurrection?
Some could say, maybe the first one, according to the principle of the seniority. Some could say, maybe the oldest one, according to the principle of the age. Maybe the last one according to the timeline. Maybe the one, who had only one wife, remember this is an era of having one or more wife. Maybe the one the wife loved the most. Maybe the one who loved the woman the most. Maybe the most handsome. Maybe the most responsible. Maybe the nicest. Maybe the most caring. Maybe the richest one. Maybe the poorest one. Maybe the one in between of the categories.
However, according to the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus told them: “You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘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.” God considers them all alive.
Jesus says that at the end we will become similar to the angels, and we will never die, so the general resurrection is obviously beyond what we may consider as biological existence, as the Gospel of Luke reads : Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.
Surely the Sadducees compered the apples to the oranges, our earthly life to the life we will have in the spiritual world. We call it heaven.
Mostly we have our senses to experience this earthly world, and it looks very real. However the spiritual world which surrounds us, it is also very real, but it is invisible like the angles are invisible. In order to see and hear the spiritual world, beyond the horizon of the seas, beyond the mountains, beyond the clouds, even beyond the stars, to see the invisible, we have to see and hear with our hearts. You have to close your earthly eyes and earthly ears, and then with your mind you can touch the holy angels, summoned before the very throne of the Holy God.
May the Lord open our eyes and our ears to see the spiritual world, as our real home for eternity. May the Lord multiply our good deeds to become worthy for the world to come. Amen.