After Thoughts: Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 20:27-38

This Gospel reading for the 25th Sunday after Pentecost, falling on the Sunday we celebrate All Saints’ Day, has been a great comfort to me. You may be wondering why. I know, at first reading, it seems a bit odd and perhaps irrelevant. If a man dies, and his wife has no children, the man’s brother marries her. That brother dies and another brother marries her. On and on until all seven brother-in-law/husbands are gone, and finally, the poor woman herself passes on. Which one is her husband in the afterlife? It does indeed sound strange. But even weirder is the original law which calls for sandal removal and spitting in the face if the law is broken. (See Deut. 25 for the details.)

It’s not just this law that interests me. It’s all those fascinating laws of the OT that we often laugh at or disregard, but which have such profound purpose. The Law was given to flawed creatures (all humankind) living in an imperfect world (throughout time, not just this current generation) to protect and enrich relationship, first with God, and then with one another. Women today still have our struggles, but they are of a different type than this perpetual bride who lived in a time when women were basically property. As long as a female had a husband or son, a male protector, she had some degree of security. On her own, she was nothing.

So this particular law, much like Jesus’s rebuke of divorce, as well as all of the law, is meant to protect, love, and nurture the most vulnerable in society. The law is perverted when, as the Sadducees in this story did, and as we often do, it is misinterpreted in legalistic, literalistic, and often pedantic ways. To attempt to apply earthly law to the heavenly realm is a gross misunderstanding of God’s cosmos. Jesus tells them in no uncertain terms how off track they are in their thinking.

Yet, for those of us who do believe in resurrection, we often try to imagine what it might be like. Some might say those imaginings are childish or futile, even sappy and silly. But having experienced the loss of both parents and a younger brother, I must say there is something comforting in thinking of them there together in heaven. After my dad died, my cousin sent a beautiful email, imagining Dad arriving in heaven, back with his parents and his dear sister who had died too early. He painted a picture in words of them gathered around the kitchen table, cups of coffee for all, eagerly awaiting Dad’s arrival and asking him to put on a pot of chili.

Sappy and silly, perhaps. But I don’t think Jesus would mind. Like the anticipation of Christmas morning, so is the resurrection, and the promise of no more tears, no more death. Jesus has something remarkably good in store for God’s children after this earthly journey. As the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death came around this week, there was tremendous solace in this promise, remembering her as one of those saints who has gone to her reward. After my dad died in 2010, we found a little handwritten note folded in his wallet. “The best is yet to come.” For my mom, dad, and brother, that ‘best’ has come.

As a child, I loved Heidi – the book, the movie, the whole idea of a little girl running around on a beautiful mountain. Years later, as an adult, I was blessed to call Switzerland home for several years and to travel around the country. On one trip to a small mountain village, I disappeared when we got to the hotel. I had wandered around to the side porch, a wide veranda stocked with rocking chairs, and got lost in the beauty before me. Charlie was calling my name. When he finally came around the corner and found me, I was beaming. “Remember when you dream about something and so many times the reality is a disappointment? But this? This is so much better than I even imagined. It takes my breath away.”

Just take a moment to think about all these beautiful earthly gifts God has bestowed upon us. Mountains, deserts, plains. Sun, moon, stars. Animals, forests, sea, and land. And especially us, the human race, and the gift of relationship with one another. Relationship comes in so many different packages and is a profound, though imperfect, gift in our fallen world. Romantic love is beautiful. Until it isn’t. Parenthood is wonderful, yet painful when relationship splinters. Friendship is a blessing, but can fall apart. Our human relationships are still beautiful though fragile and deeply flawed. In the resurrection, relationship will be perfected, purified, and made whole. So it is that imagination fails me when I ponder entering the dance of sacred eternal relationship with the Divine Trinity at the resurrection. The best is yet to come indeed.