2 Thessalonians 2. 1 – 5, 13 – 17
Luke 20. 27 – 38
Remembrance Sunday
Fr Alex
I was watching one of my favourite episodes of ‘Blackadder’ the other night – perhaps you’re a devotee as I am. There’s a wonderful moment when the dull-witted Prince Regent is lamenting the fact that he keeps getting into debates with his detractors, and can never think of a good response to their clever arguments. He always gets stumped, and made to look a fool; and it’s only much later that he can think of what he should’ve said.
The Prince says, “Only last night some fellow said to me that I had the wit and sophistication of a donkey.”
Blackadder responds, “Oh that’s absurd sir. Unless of course it was a particularly stupid donkey.”
And the Prince says: “You see, if only I’d thought of saying that.”
It’s a good joke. But it’s not a nice feeling, is it, when someone trumps you in an argument and leaves you looking clueless – especially when it’s in public.
And that’s exactly what the Sadducees are trying to do to Jesus in this exchange today. They have no interest in debate or sharing or learning; they simply want to catch out their opponent with a ‘gotcha’ question that will leave him looking foolish, and discredited.
It’s a depressingly familiar way of carrying out debate, as we see so much of it today – whether it’s on a university campus, BBC Question Time, or even General Synod, on occasion, the debates are often acrimonious, boundaried, reduced to point-scoring.
One of the main things about the Sadducees was that they didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead. There was nothing deficient or unfulfilled about this life, they believed; they regarded their prosperity as a sign of divine favour, and were quite happy with it. Why risk living life over again, when this one has gone so well?
But the scenario they create really shows how impoverished this idea of life is. The woman of the story has no purpose beyond producing children to carry on the male line, going through brother after brother as they each die. And even in the life to come, if there is one, they assume that she will still belong to someone.
The question they ask, and the way they ask it, is all too human, completely limited by what they can see or even imagine. But Jesus responds by breaking down these walls of misapprehension, and expanding their horizons.
The life to come isn’t just a re-run or a second chance, and it certainly doesn’t lock people into the same oppressive patterns of power and status, and all the suffering that inevitably goes along with it. There is something so much more, so much better; there is the fullness of life, lived “like angels and children of God.”
And this is not just some far off life to come: this resurrection life has already broken into our earthly existence. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, even Moses himself, the source of the Sadducees’ moral authority: “to [God] all of them are alive.”
The Sadducees asked a very human question to Jesus – the wrong question, blinkered and boundaried by the limits of their human understanding.
And it got me to thinking about how we approach these issues in our own time; and especially about how we do our remembering on this Remembrance Sunday. Is our remembering limited by the human way of looking at life; or is it open to the boundless possibilities that Jesus reveals to us?
It would be all too easy, as we look around the world, and see the growing hostility and suspicion between peoples and nations – the awful situations in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, and many other places – it would be all too easy for our remembering simply to become mourning.
Mourning for the mistakes and sacrifices of the past, and mourning the fact that nothing ever changes; that mistakes and sacrifices are an inevitable part of our present, and our future too. But that is the human way of looking at life; an impoverished and unimaginative way of seeing life.
Christian remembering can never just stop at mourning; it must always give way to hope. And that is because Christ didn’t stop at the Cross. He went through the suffering and death and darkness not out of solidarity with us, or because that’s just the way human life is. He went through all that to show us that when we experience the suffering and death and darkness of the world, it does not have the last word. There is something better, beyond our imagining; there is light, and hope, in abundance.
That is at the heart of today’s Gospel reading, and our remembering at this solemn time. “He is God not of the dead, but of the living” – and that truth applies not only in some far-off time to those who die in the faith, but to our experience of life right now.
In our Christian remembering, we make a commitment not to forget the past – but we also commit ourselves to work with God to bring about his promised future. Not to give in to despair that nothing will ever change – but to be the agents of change ourselves, in whatever small way we can.
At the end of the service we will keep the traditional two-minutes silence in memory of those who have died in war. I encourage you not to let that be an empty silence; nor yet a silence filled only with sadness.
Make that silence a commitment to our beautiful and hopeful Christian remembering: an active remembering that takes us out of the blinkered and boundaried human way of living, and into all the possibilities of the eternal and boundless life that Jesus came to bring us.
Perhaps we might all consider: how are we being called to be an agent of peace and hope in our own life? May you be strengthened and encouraged in whatever that may be. Amen.