Preached at Christ Church, Billericay, 6 November 2022
Intro – The Resurrection is Everything
This morning we have two readings that talk about the resurrection, so I’m going to look at each of them to see what they tell us, and to see that the resurrection is key to our beliefs as Christians.
What Job background
I’ll start with Job, but before we look at the reading today, we’ll have a quick re-cap on Job’s story.
Job had everything – a big family and great wealth. He was also careful to follow all the rules, and present the right sacrifices at the right times, he would even make precautionary sacrifices for his sons – just in case they had sinned, and he didn’t know it.
Satan’s Challenge
One day, God was telling Satan about him, and Satan challenged God to take all the good things from Job to see if he would still worship God in the same way. God allowed Satan to attack Job, but not to kill him. Job knew nothing of this conversation – obviously.
His wealth is taken, his children are killed, and he is afflicted with terrible diseases. Bad things happen to good people.
Job’s friends
Three ‘friends’ arrive to council him, to encourage him to reflect on his life and repent of the evil he has so obviously done. They are an object lesson in how not to help someone in distress. At one point Job’s wife tells him to curse God and die. Just the sort of support you need from your nearest and dearest.
Justice
All Job wants is an opportunity to put his case to God, that he may get justice. By the time we get to chapter 19, Job thinks he will soon die, so he is looking to get justice after his death. In the pagan theology of the time, a personal patron-deity acted as a champion for an individual human, pleading his cause in the council of the gods. In the Book of Job, the angels perform this role.
Personal Justice
That’s not good enough for Job, he wants to put his own words to God.
“Oh, that my words
were recorded, that they were written on a scroll, that they were
inscribed with an iron tool on lead, or engraved in rock forever!”
The scroll that Job is talking about would probably be made of copper, so whatever medium is used Job’s words will last a long time.
Then Job sees something else. Where this vision came from we are not told, but we know that Job was faithful, so we can assume he knew his scriptures, and he gets just a glimpse of resurrection.
And after my skin has been
destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with
my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!
Job sees a bodily resurrection and his chance to put his case before God and receive justice. It gives him a new hope to go on, something to look forward to through his misery and impending death.
Ending Job’s story
If you don’t know the ending of Job’s story you can read it later, start at chapter 38 and read to the end.
The Sadducees
In our second reading, Jesus is teaching in the temple courts. The Pharisees and Sadducees are asking various questions and hoping to trip Him up. Now it’s the Sadducees turn. The Sadducees focus on the Pentateuch – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, & Deuteronomy. They do not consider later writings to have the same importance, and they rejected the oral tradition that was taught by the Pharisees.
The ‘gotcha’ question
They do not believe in the resurrection of the dead, and like a lot of people with fixed views, they have ready-made examples to prove their point. In this case, that the resurrection is impossible. So they have a scenario involving 7 brothers. According to Jewish law, if a husband dies childless, his brother must marry his widow and try to provide children for his brother. In their scenario, each of the 7 brothers dies, and finally the widow dies – still childless. So whose wife will she be at the resurrection?
Well, there is no way to answer that, so there cannot be resurrection – God wouldn’t give them laws that can’t be obeyed.
The Answer
Jesus has an answer, of course. He splits life into two ages. The current age, where people marry and live out their lives, and the age to come, after the resurrection, where there is no longer marriage, or death, because the people there are like the angels. They are all God’s children. That answers a part of their question.
Jesus then goes on to explain that even Moses, the key scriptural figure for the Sadducees, recognises that there is resurrection. That’s Exodus 3:6
Then he said, “I am
the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the
God of Jacob.”
So God is “not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”
Of course, the listening Pharisees support Jesus in this.
Resurrection – not believable
Jesus makes it plain in many places in the gospels that he will be killed and will rise again. Despite the debates we have looked at between the Sadducees and the Pharisees (and Jesus) the disciples found the resurrection difficult to believe. They were devastated when Jesus was arrested and killed, they may have accepted what the Pharisees said, but they really believed what the Sadducees said.
When the two women went to the tomb to prepare Jesus’ body and found the stone rolled away, they returned quickly to Peter and John and told them what had happened. They were not believed.
When Jesus appeared to his disciples in the locked room, they couldn’t deny that it was Him, but Thomas who was not with them was not convinced. Until, of course, his turn came to meet the risen Jesus, then he believed. Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” (John 20:29)
It is perhaps more difficult for us than it was for Thomas. We are not going to get a chance to meet the risen Jesus in the flesh.
My response
I was first introduced to about 30 teenagers at this church in the very early eighties by a colleague. One of the things I had to be sure about was that the claims of the resurrection were reasonable. I wasn’t looking for proof, I was just looking to see if the apparently ridiculous claim that a man rose from the dead was in any way believable – I wasn’t expecting it to be.
I spent many months talking to this friend, the group leaders and another friend not associated with this church before coming to the conclusion that is was not just reasonable but probable. Getting to a level where I could accept it as an article of faith took a bit longer.
Those discussions though were not what finally made me decide to follow Jesus, but without them I wouldn’t have ever got close.
Paul
Belief in the resurrection is critical to all the other beliefs about God and Jesus that we hold. There were people in Corinth who said there was no resurrection – here’s how Paul responded:
1 Cor 15:13 If there is no
resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.
14
And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is
your faith.
15 More than that, we are then found to
be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he
raised Christ from the dead.
Has it changed us
I wonder, though, how much has our belief in the resurrection changed us. I remember (rather vaguely, I ashamed to say) an African bishop talking about our health and safety culture and asking why, if we believe in the resurrection, we are so afraid of death.
It wasn’t always like that.
Early church
The famous Roman physician Galen marvelled at the Early Christians’ courage in the face of death: “Their contempt for death is apparent to us every day.” Romans wondered at the courage of Christians in the Colosseum, many of whom faced their martyrdom, singing.
Martyrs
There are countless examples through the ages of Christian Martyrs going cheerfully to their deaths, singing praises to God, knowing that they will meet Him at the resurrection.
Sir Thomas More
There are other example too. Sir Thomas More, who was charged with high treason, is said to have joked with his executioners.
He asked for help ascending the scaffold, but assured his executioner that coming down would not be so much trouble. He even moved his beard out of the way, so it should not be cut, lightly remarking that at least it “hath not committed treason.”
He had once considered becoming a monk, and clearly had a strong faith in the resurrection.
Our Lives
I often wonder how strong my faith would be, should I face persecution and death. I know that we can never really know how we would respond if that situation were to occur.
But we can see how we respond to the lesser threats that we face each day. The ridicule, being ignored or shunned, being passed over for promotion, being pushed out of a job, there are any number of small way that the world can reject us and make our lives less tolerable.
Can we respond positively to those threats, knowing that however difficult this life is, there will be a resurrection, and then we can live with our God as we would like?
Both Paul and James have something to say about our present sufferings, here’s Paul:
Romans 8:18 I consider that
our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that
will be revealed in us.
And James:
The resurrection is a critical belief in defining whether we are Christian or not. Perhaps if we had a better appreciation of the resurrection, like Job, if it was as real to us as it was to the early martyrs, if we saw it as clearly as Jesus did, then we would be less concerned with our difficulties and more prepared to openly talk about the things we believe.
Amen.
Recording on YouTube https://youtu.be/dCgyRcVNvY4
References
https://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/no-more-death-john-lowe-sermon-on-death-235536?page=5&wc=800
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/456351-you-christians-look-after-a-document-containing-enough-dynamite-to
https://www.gaudiummag.com/p/they-went-to-their-deaths-singing
https://www.luminarium.org/renlit/moreexecution.htm
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