The Sadducees and Bodily Resurrection.
Am I alone in crossing my fingers behind my back at the point in the Creed when we declare that we look to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come? It is not just resurrection that I find troubling, although it does pose some tricky questions, trickier, I suggest than those with which the Sadducees try to trick Jesus. Never mind whose wife/husband you will be in heaven (or hell for that matter); which you will you be? Will I be the gangly young man with rather too much dark curly hair and a winning way with old ladies, or the perhaps slightly wiser, certainly larger and more decrepit specimen addressing you now?
But these are comparatively facile questions; what bothers me more about the idea of an afterlife, and in particular one which is a reward or punishment for one’s performance in this one, is the way in which it belittles the significance of this life. Conventional belief in heaven and hell make our present existence important only as a precursor, as dummy run, and, although one with lasting consequence, but not the “real thing”, not what really matters. This tends to suggest that our efforts are hopeless and it reduces virtue to a means to an end. But if we see being good, as certainly want to see it, as being how God meant us to be, and working with him in creating a world of happiness and fulfilment, then doing good for a reward (or to avoid a punishment) is rather feeble motivation.
The Gospels are full of talk of another world beyond this one, where injustices are redressed and selfishness and cruelty punished, but the idea seems to me to be somewhat contradictory to the Good News that Jesus brings. That Good News is immediate, practical and physical, although it often, perhaps always has a spiritual dimension too, a dimension that goes beyond the tangible. But the spiritual healing, the vision, and the relief, in short, salvation, come from mended legs, eyes that can see, satisfied hunger or escape from a downward spiral wealth and greed and guilt. In none of the miracles nor in the other instances where Jesus brings salvation, is there any suggestion that it is something stored up for the future. They are not about an afterlife but about this one and the wider spiritual dimension emerges from immediate practical physicality- mostly concerned with bodily failings or needs- illness, disability, hunger or danger.
Why then has Christianity from the very beginning been so obsessed with the last judgement, the second coming and a life after, and much more important than, this one?
Partly, of course, because from the start Christians were persecuted and needed the encouragement to endure until a second coming which St Paul thought was imminent. Persecution may have ceased (for us, at least- it’s still a real experience for many of our fellow Christians), but the lot of most people, most of the time and in most places has remained terrible, and made worse by the apparent success of evil. The virtuous are not usually the better fed and we see greed and selfishness amply rewarded. So it is very tempting to believe that this is not the real world, and that there is another place in which goodness will be rewarded and the wicked punished, or without the vindictiveness of conventional eschatology, a place where there will at least be no hunger, fear or pain.
I can sympathise with that feeling, beside outside persecution and the perennial grinding down of the poor, there is another perhaps deeper, longing for permanence, a desire to recognise and live, something real and lasting, beyond the transitory experience of life. This longing can be answered with belief that indeed our physical existence is temporary and passing, and however sensibly felt (especially if you a starving, crippled, homeless or blind) yet it’s not the real thing and somehow we may rise above it. And so one answer has been to withdraw as completely as possible from the world, most extremely as monks or hermits or perhaps more prosaically in despising and rejecting any physical comfort or pleasure for a lean- and it seems to me, joyless existence.
I can sympathise with that feeling too but I do not think it has to be satisfied by anything beyond this world in temporal or spatial terms, not literally, nor in the necessarily metaphorical language we use in talking of heaven and hell. Instead and more constructively we should cultivate those glimpses of permanence or that lasting reality, in the beauty which we see in the best paintings or sculpture, in the thrilling serenity of great architectural space, in poetry and in music- in each instance achieved with the physical material of this world and a dose of divine inspiration and skill.
I have said that the conventional idea of the after-life is necessarily imagined in metaphorical terms; we will no longer have eye and ears and fingers with which to see and hear the heavenly choirs or to feel the fine white cloth of our new clothes. But there is a deficiency in the idea of an after or other life that goes beyond the difficulty of describing it. It I think, impossible to have a sense of achievement or satisfaction or even escape and relief without also having a sense of terrestrial time and space. Without that sense there can be no narrative, no conclusion and no relief. More vitally without any physicality, there can be no growth and no creation. This is where I find Jesus’ response to the Sadducees most difficult. He says there no marriage in Heaven, and impliedly no procreation; so however angelic, it is a sterile and essentially lifeless world, in all the ways we recognise life.
I would rather turn the table round and see heaven and hell as the ideal state of this physical world which we inhabit. I have mentioned ways in which the material world in the hands (or voices) of inspired artists can reveal something beyond itself. So it can on a more mundane level in the even small acts of kindness which we can all achieve in our daily lives, and also in the great and communal movements towards social justice and an equitable and sustainable distribution of the world’s resources. Those goals may seem remote, but if we see heaven as a state that can be achieved on earth, it gives the attempt to achieve them a meaning beyond immediate success and failure. This is surely our daily prayer that “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven”. And the converse is perhaps more obviously true; just a little greed, anger, selfishness and hatred go a long way in achieving the misery and desperation –the real hell- that we see around us.
So perhaps I can uncross my fingers if I can read the belief in the resurrection of the body as the recognition that our bodies and our physical existence generally are capable of achieving the lasting reality that transcends their apparent physical limitations of death and decay. And I can believe in an everlasting life, as living as part of long, indeed infinite story, participating in God’s loving purpose for his world. This is believing that heaven and hell are not rewards or punishments but only the consequences of our success and failure to live up to this challenge, and this promise. Amen.