Three Before Advent

‘He is God not of the dead but of the living.’

Last year Isobel Jonathan and I had a few days in London. We visited two museums in two days.  Which is something of a record for me in particular because although I love and study history yet I don’t really like museums all that much. We visited the Handel House Museum and the Cabinet War Rooms combined with the Churchill Museum. Both of them were fascinating because they ignited you not just to view the past as  the past but to enter into  the past and  into the life and times  of Handel and Churchill and the events and circumstances of their lives.

In the war rooms you could actually feel the tension and the import of the momentous decisions made there. Over the last few years museums have had something of a makeover. Once they were dull and forbidding places, where history seemed locked away in glass cases gathering dust in a tomb like gloom. Now they are bright, lively and welcoming. Through a hands on and interactive approach they encourage us to engage with history. And that is important because if we don’t understand the past properly then we shall fail to understand the present. We need to know where we have come from so that we can understand where we are and gain proper direction for where we are going. Past present and future is a continuum.

Our past in not something to be preserved in a glass case like an historic artefact to be looked at. Our past is not just an historic monument. Nor can we live in the past in the hope that nothing will change because we live with the belief that nothing has ever changed.

Our understanding of this church and what goes on within it could be a case in point. It would be very easy for us to assume that the way the church is laid out now and what happens within it is the same as it always was. But that would be a big mistake. The look of the church, the layout, its contents and what happens for example in worship will have changed many times over the years. We would hardly recognise this place five hundred years ago. We would hardly recognise the worship offered here fifty years ago. Change is of the very nature of any living organism or organisation.

Blessed John Henry Newman once remarked  ‘In a higher world it may be otherwise, but here below to live is to change and to have become perfect is to have changed often’. The proper study of history helps us to understand that history is the study of the changes that have occurred and why they have occurred. History is not a prison it is and always has been a point of departure. We need to learn from it but not be imprisoned by it. History rightly understood helps us to understand the present and leads us on into the future.

That was the message that Jesus was trying to convey to the Sadducees in the Gospel for today. And I’ll come back to that in a minute but first a word about the Sadducees. The Sadducees were a select party, highly influential, who drew their membership from the wealthy and the well to do. The Sadducees were the high political flyers, the merchants the aristocrats and the priests. They were at the top of society, well off and with much to lose if society fell into revolution. Hence they accommodated themselves to the rule of the Romans – with whom they got on reasonably well for most of the time. The Romans kept the peace and the Sadducees kept their wealth and their position and both parties were happy with that arrangement. The worldly influence of the Sadducees with their ‘Lets not rock the boat’ mentality led them to be also religiously very conservative. They abhorred feared and distrusted any hint of change or innovation. Unlike the Pharisees the Sadducees accepted as scripture only the written law found in the first five books of the bible. They rejected the authority of the later oral tradition which the Pharisees espoused. The Sadducees saw that oral tradition and indeed even the later scriptures as a novel and unorthodox innovation. As wealthy aristocrats they definitely did not look forward to the coming of a liberating Messiah – that idea was far too revolutionary. And because the doctrine isn’t found in the books of Moses but only in later Old Testament books they didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead either. (There’s a pun here – ‘That’s why they were sad you see’)! Instead of the resurrection the Sadducees believed that all people good and bad went to the shadowy world of Sheol after their death. That rather convenient belief for them left them to enjoy their present good life without any worry about the afterlife.

So when we hear as we do in today’s Gospel that the Sadducees are asking Jesus what he believes about the resurrection we can see that they had a hidden agenda. The whole subject was a hot topic between the Sadducees and the Pharisees. By asking an awkward question perhaps they could trick Jesus into upsetting both groups by giving an answer which would reveal him as unorthodox in his belief. They would then have good reason to accuse Jesus of being a heretic outside of their own narrow understanding of Jewish history. So Jesus points them back to that very history to the story of Moses and the burning bush - a pivotal moment in Israel’s history. He invites his hearers and us to look at that story indeed at all history in two ways. First as an event in the past to be venerated and preserved because of its antiquity. Rather like an object in an old fashioned museum. This is something of the past and it remains in the past. Or, Jesus implies you can in a more dynamic way allow the past to illuminate the present. Allow history to shed light on the future. Engage with the past just as our modern museums have done. We should enter into the past to allow it to inform us but we mustn’t allow ourselves to be imprisoned by it. Because history is the record of change.

Now not all that change has been good of course. But without change there would be no story to tell – for the world, for nations for societies for people to live is to change. And history tells its story. Real history is living history. In the world of faith as Jesus reminds us:  ‘God is God not of the dead but of the living’. This at first enigmatic encounter between Jesus and the Sadducees still resonates for us. We have to consider still in some form the essential question which Jesus posed to the Sadducees: ‘what kind of influence does history exert in our lives is it positive or negative?’

These are not academic questions for scholars and historians to answer. These questions are highly relevant and intensely personal. For history surrounds us and shapes us and comes in many forms. First there is the history of our church. There is so much to be thankful for – for those who have been and who still are its leaders. The countless faithful Christian people who have belonged to it supported it maintained the faith and lived the Gospel. And for the building itself.  Its beauty, its sense of the beauty and the peace of God. The worship of past and present the walls sweating with the prayers of so many. Its place within the community. We want to preserve the heritage they have bequeathed to us. But not to be imprisoned by it.

As an organic body, the Church as people which is the body of Christ grows and develops and so changes as the world around us changes. Where there is no change there is no life. History must lead us forward rather than hold us back. If we become overly concerned with preserving the past for the sake of the past then that is what shall end up with – a long past and very little future. And then there is the history of our own lives. We all carry within us our own personal history. Part of who we are is shaped by it – as is every person whom we encounter. Some of that history may be painful. Some of its baggage we need to give to God that he may heal it and redeem it. Because some of it may keep us apart from him, from each other and from our true selves - the selves that Christ in his history has made us to be. Sometimes we may feel that our personal history is holding us back. At others we know that it is enabling us to face the present and the future with hope and confidence. History is so important to us all in all our circumstances. In the world, in the church, and in our lives.

But real history; true history; history that lives and is of real value is not about preserving the past for the sake of it as in an old fashioned museum. But rather about allowing the past to shape us for the present and the future in a dynamic way.  

‘For God is not of the dead but of the living.’