Christian Paradox - Death - All are alive in God
Speaker Notes
Luke 20:27-40
The Resurrection and Marriage
27 Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. 28 “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. 30 The second 31 and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. 32 Finally, the woman died too. 33 Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”
34 Jesus replied, “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. 35 But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, 36 and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection. 37 But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ 38 He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”
39 Some of the teachers of the law responded, “Well said, teacher!” 40 And no one dared to ask him any more questions.
A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken [Chapter VIII The Way of Grief]
One of the greatest occurrences of my own grief was the strange thing that began to happen within a day or two of her death. It was the flooding back to me of all the other Davys I had known. She had been in this year of her dying the Davy she had become - the Christian Davy of Oxford and since. Even when we had read about Glenmerle days under the oaks, she had been the Davy she had become. But now the young girl of Glenmerle, the blithe spirit of the Islands, the helmsman of the schooner - all were equally present. They had been gone - except perhaps for those fragile days of heartbreaking young love during the coma. Now they were all with me - for ever. The wholeness of Davy. That wholeness can only be gained by death, I believe. In writing to Lewis of my understanding of this astonishing phenomenon, I used the analogy of reading a novel like David Copperfield that covers many years. In that book one follows the boy David running away to his Aunt Betsy Trotwood, the youth David loving Dora, the mature David with Agnes. While one reads, chapter by chapter, even as one lives one’s own life week by week, David is what he is at that particular point in the book’s time. But then, when one shuts the book at the end, all the Davids - small boy, youth, man - are equally close: and, indeed, are one. The whole David. One is then, with reference to the book’s created time, in an eternity, seeing it all in one’s own Now, even as God in His eternal Now sees the whole of history that was and is and will be. But if, as the result of death, I was now seeing the whole Davy at once, I was having a heavenly or eternal vision of her. Only, in heaven I would have not vision only but her - whole.
The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology quote:
The body is the symbol, not of individuality, but of solidarity. It is that which binds, in each individual, divinely unique as he is, an inescapable relatedness to the whole of nature and history and the cosmic order. It is the bond of continuity and unity between man and his environment, between individual and community, between generation and generation. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body is the doctrine of the redemption and replacement of one solidarity by another, by the body of the old mortality by the Body of Christ. It is an assertion that no individual can be saved apart from the whole. Through His body He is organically linked with all other life and all other matter in the universe. There is no redemption for the individual out of this math, but only in it and with it. The Christian Gospel is not of the rescuing of individuals out of nature and history, but the redeeming of all the myriad relationships of creation into a new Heaven and a new Earth - the City of God, the Body of Christ.
Hebrews 11 Biblegateway link
John Donne The Works of John Donne: With a Memoir of His Life google books link
Jürgen’s Blog