See More Than You See
Wednesday:
Ninth week of the Year
June 1,
2016
Mark 12:18-27, 2 Timothy
1:1-12; Psalm 123:1-2.
The
first of the last three hostile questions Jesus is asked in Mark’s Gospel
before his passion dealt with the Christian stance toward government. The
proper concern of the state is to protect and promote the common good of all
its citizens on this earth. And Christians’ conscientious participation in this
endeavor should give a special character to all our activities and
relationships in this world.
The
second question raises the issue of life after death. If there is none or, as
Plato observed, if there is no God, then the highest of all human occupations
is to seek the greatest good for the greatest number through politics. But if
life has a higher ceiling than that, we need to know it. So we are interested
when “some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and asked
him a question.”
Not
believing in resurrection, angels or spirits (Acts 23:8), the Sadducees could not believe in much of an after
life. “Less devout than the Pharisees and more politically-minded” (Bible of Jerusalem, Matthew 3:7 note), they were the priestly
aristocracy. Not surprising. Those who live for this world frequently rise high
in it.
Their
question, meant only to make resurrection look ridiculous, was about seven
brothers married successively to the same woman. “In the resurrection whose
wife will she be?”
Jesus
just told them they didn’t have a clue about what life after death was like.
“You know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.” When people rise from
the dead they don’t pair off in marriages. They “are like angels in heaven” —
not, we should note, because they don’t have bodies, but because they are not
limited by them.
Is
that a clear answer? No. What it does make clear is that there are some things
beyond human comprehension, and if we are interested in truth we should seek it
without restricting it to what we see. “For as the heavens are higher than the
earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts”
(Isaiah 55:9). Paul said of heaven, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the
human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1Corinthians
2:9).
Do
we really think God enters into relationship with persons on this earth, just
to let them drop into non-existence after a few years? Simply giving them life
is already a covenant. Jesus said God is “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
[add names you know]. He is God not of the dead, but of the living.” We know
that.
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