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Haggai 1:15b-2:9; Luke 20:27-38
In our Luke passage we find Jesus in a spat with the Sadducees over a matter pertaining to what happens to us after we die. The Sadducees did not believe in resurrection and were trying to use the Law of Moses to show Jesus that he was being scripturally inaccurate. To prove their point, they confronted Jesus with a ridiculous scenario: A man dies leaving behind a wife and no children. According to the Law of Moses his brother must marry her. Oddly, the brothers keep dying. You would think that after a while the next brother in line would have been afraid to marry her. Well, all seven brothers die and then the woman dies. So, the Sadducees ask Jesus a ridiculous question: whose wife she will be after the resurrection? Jesus answered saying that there won’t be marriage in the resurrection. He then goes on to say that there will be a resurrection because Moses refers to God as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He does not refer to God as the one who was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob which would imply that they are dead and gone. The way Moses has worded things indicates that they are still alive. Touchez. Koodos. Well done lad. Debate won by means of emphazing the tense of the verb “to be”.
The problem that the Sadducees had with resurrection was multi-faceted. They believed that when you died, you died. This life was the only shot you got. There was no spirit that lived on. Only God is immortal and the closest we can come to immortality is to have lots of male descendants through whom the family name would live on. They saw a huge problem inherent in believing in an afterlife in that a person could spend all their time getting and keeping themselves ready for the next life while ignoring the needs of this life. The Pharisees were guilty of this mistake. They were Legalists and spent their time trying to appear righteous and getting converts to their way of believing all the while ignoring the Bible’s demands for justice and equity…not that the Sadducees did any better in that department.
Many Christians today make the same mistake by saying that all that matters is trusting in Jesus so you can go to heaven and doing everything you can to get as many people converted so they can go with you. They get so caught up in being right about being a Christian, going to church, and their good values and learning about how the Bible says that everything and everybody around them – the world – are wrong and God is going to destroy it all. They get so caught up in all that and don’t seem to care what happens to the environment because of our lifestyles or that sixty children died from poverty during the two minutes they impatiently sat in the Tim Horton’s drive thru waiting for a coffee that wasn’t the product of fair trade. Well, I shouldn’t say that it doesn’t matter to them. It’s just too big a problem for them to think about and it seems there’s nothing anybody can really do about it anyway. So, they just go on with their “Christian” way of life believing that this evil world is soon to end and they and their Christian friends are going to heaven if they just keep trusting Jesus.
The fact that this world will come to an end and that there will be resurrection and new creation does not get us off the hook for how we live our lives now. Our lifestyles have consequences. It is the way that we live our lives that creates the conditions of poverty in this world and which destroy the environment. We get so caught up in trying to trust God with every little detail of our lives that we don’t see beyond God-and-me to the larger problems that evil and our participation in it causes in God’s good creation.
Sometimes people do catch a glimpse of the bigger picture and go to the other extreme of believing activism and progress will make things better. These folks put a lot of hope into the hands of politicians thinking that if you get the right people in the right form of government the world’s problems will disappear by means of progress. In Jesus’ day there were revolutionaries who held this position or something similar to it. They would raise up a Messiah and start a war. This was what the Sadducees were afraid Jesus might be up to. You see, they were the establishment.
Sadducee-ism was the branch of Israelite faith that most of the wealthy and the temple priests held to. Because of their wealth and position they had it pretty good and probably believed that they were doing things just the way God wanted them done and so God was blessing them. All they had to do was to continue support the temple and the priests and God would in turn continue to bless them.
I’ve presented you with three ways of doing the faith here. The first is simply believing that this world is coming to an end so why bother to make anything better. That’s Escapism. The second is the belief that activism and progress will bring in the Kingdom of God. That’s being a Progressive. The third one is believing that God is on your side because you have wealth and power. That’s being a Conservative. Jesus was none of these. Jesus was a Resurrectionist, if I might invent a word. Jesus wanted his followers to live faithfully in the present according to the hope of resurrection.
This Resurrectionist way is more like the word of prophecy that God gave to Haggai to give to Joshua and Zerubbabel when they sought to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem upon returning from the Babylonian Exile. God said, “Work, for I am with you.” This word came to the small yet faithful remnant who returned to Judah at the end of the Babylonian exile. When they got back they decided to build their own houses, lavishly I might add, to the neglect of the temple and as a result they did not find fulfillment. They never seemed to have enough. God eventually had to send drought to get their attention. God told them to build the temple and even though it might not be what it was in its former days, it would still be that in that place, in that temple, God would grant peace. The Hebrew word for peace is Shalom and it is more than simply the absence of enmity. It means contentment, friendship, prosperity, and mental and emotional soundness.
So now nearly 2,500 years later we the followers of Jesus are to follow the same word of prophecy. We too are to involve ourselves in the work of building the temple, but by that I don’t mean church buildings or even the institution of the church. 1 Corinthians 3:16 asks: “Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?” We are the temple. This fellowship in Christ is the temple. God’s Spirit dwells in us and is evident in our fellowship.
One thing to know about the temple in the Bible, it was not simply a place where people came to sing hymns and hear a sermon. It was the place where human brokenness was dealt with and healed. It was the place where God and people were reconciled. It was the place where there was Shalom. Therefore, as those who are now made alive in Christ, who have the hope of resurrection, and as the Holy Spirit is in us, our first order of work is to be the temple. Our Christian fellowship is to be a place where God and people, each of us, are reconciled, where our brokenness is dealt with and healed, where there is Shalom.
Our first order of work is to let the gift of the peace of Christ become a reality in our midst. We do this by confronting our brokenness; first the brokenness in our relationship with God by just coming to God in prayer and talking it out. Then we deal with the brokenness in our lives by seeking to heal our broken and hurting relationships with humility, gentleness, remorse, and forgiveness. Then, we deal with the brokenness in our midst by holding one another accountable to the teachings of Jesus. Healing and reconciliation is the goal. That’s living resurrection life now, living now as a reflection of the way life will be post-resurrection.
Friends, we are the temple where God has chosen to dwell. Let us not neglect that. Let’s make it a beautiful temple. Amen.
