Sister Wendy Beckett, nun turned unlikely media star, was asked by a TV journalist how she would like to be remembered after her death. She paused, looked at him, & said: “I don’t want to be remembered.”
It reminded me of Jesus and the Sadducees, but before we go there, allow me to borrow a parable…
There was a man who invented the art of making fire. He took his tools and went to a tribe in the north, where it was cold, bitterly cold. He taught people to make fire.
The people were very interested. He showed them the uses to which they could put their fire – not just to cook and keep themselves warm, but they could even see one another and see things they had previously just taken for granted. They were so grateful to learn this fire making.
But before they could express their gratitude, the man had disappeared. He wasn't concerned with getting their recognition or gratitude; only with their well-being. He pressed on to another tribe, where he again began to show them the value and the light of his invention.
People were interested there, too, a bit too interested for the peace of mind of their uncomfortable priests and politicians, who began to notice how the man was drawing crowds. They were losing their influence, so they decided to do away with the man, and crucified him. But they were afraid that the people might turn against them, so they were very wise, and even very wily.
Do you know what they did? They had a portrait of the man made, and mounted it on the main altar of the temple. The instruments for making fire were placed in front of the portrait, and the people were taught to revere the portrait and to pay reverence to the instruments of fire, which they dutifully did.
A book was written all about the man and a liturgy all about the book, and songs all about the liturgy. Veneration and worship to the fire making man went on for centuries after centuries, so that his name was remembered, but his fire was allowed to die out.
The moral - IF worship isn't leading to fire, if adoration isn't leading to love, if liturgy isn't leading to life, if this sermon isn’t leading to clarity & awareness, why?
IF you agree that it is not from lack of religion that the world is suffering, but from lack of love, lack of awareness, lack of freedom, then Jesus speaks in you.
IF you believe Jesus told disciples to watch and pray, to be alert, to judge not, to be the light in the word, to die to the self, to love the neighbour as the self and not to resist violence... Jesus presumably thought this was not only possible and preferable, but even realistic. How?
Psychologists today call these experiences intrinsic religion, bringing with them life in all its fullest, and not that religion which psychologists call extrinsic religion, bringing with it a social convention of guilt and anxiety.
I mention all this because the Sadducee religion was also a social convention, a keeping it all in the family, a maintaining of Israel’s corporate life, a using of laws, like the law to ensure effective biological reproduction.
Wanting to protect this everlasting tribal life, the Sadducees were suspicious of resurrection, Jesus’ fuller life.
They revered only the first five books of the OT, so to make Jesus look stupid, they confronted him with a joke based on the law from Deuteronomy 25, a law by which an unmarried but living brother of a recently dead but childless man would be required to marry his widow.
So in Luke 20, 27-38, the Sadducees challenge Jesus, rolling their eyes, mocking, implying a celestial orgy or a family feud, by saying: “Look Jesus, if a woman marries seven brothers who all die one by one still leaving her childless, whose is she in resurrection life?”
Quite like Sister Wendy Beckett with the TV journalist, Jesus just undercuts their basic premise. Resurrection, he says, doesn’t even mean continuity. In eternal life, since angels are undying and genderless, there is no marriage anyway, and so the old names and forms do not even apply. It is an entirely different order of life.
Jesus also brings up Moses, who the Sadducees revere, perceiving the living God saying through a bush: "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” And, if you remember, Moses also seeks to know who God is, and perceives God say: “Tell the Israelites, I am sent you.”
Now, Jesus knows Abraham Isaac and Jacob have died, but he stresses that God is present, and therefore beyond time. He tells the Sadducees all live in God, the God of the living, the God who is I am. Jesus stresses the present as eternity elsewhere, as in John 8:58, when he says of himself: “truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.” Time is in us, but in God, its all happening at once.
SO, resurrection is not only a past event for Christ and a future event for us, but a present event for both. It is being present, letting go and letting God, I am, watch and pray within you. Just as Jesus’ resurrection life caused the Sadducees to rethink the meaning of their own life, it can cause us to be more conscious, right here and now, so that our own awareness of I am can actually evolve.
I am not telling you, I am exploring this process with you. What is it? Firstly, I am can evolve through our body, whose job, with its worldly drives, is to keep going as long as possible. Then, I am can also evolve through our ego, that reactive sense of individuality, whose job is to identify with some part of the world, to grab it, and not to let it go at any cost, to be, as eucharist liturgy says, the I am who is unworthy to receive the Lord.
And then again, for some of us, I am can evolve even further, into the life of the soul, a subtler, finer, more conscious awareness, until, at last, I am evolves to a point, as it says in 1st Corinthians, when God will be all in all, all that is, a pure ’isness.
Finally then, I am can be, since sickness, age and death are all unavoidable, an I am who really is.
Christ Jesus, as we can clearly see by looking at the gospel reading, doesn’t regard this as automatic. He draws a distinction between those who are worthy of resurrection and those who are not. What does this mean? I think he means that this evolution of I am, as a potential inner growth, a process of creation knowing itself in creator, is a matter of potential, not one of fact.
It was expressed by 17th century Lutheran Christian turned Catholic Priest Angelus Silesius, who said of personal life: “The beast will become man, man will become angelic, and the angel, once fully healed, will become God. Beast will become man, man will become angelic, and the angel, once fully healed, will become God.”
If we die to our past, eternal life enters. If we try to preserve it, perhaps we are the dead burying their own dead, as Jesus said. Even today, there is a Christian version of the Sadducees’ religion, an everlasting life, not eternal life, a mere continuity grab, a security blanket for the guilty, a fear management system, which, if we are not quite careful, locks us into even more inner conflict and perpetuates a pre-human image of God, a controlling law giver from a necessarily fearful, terrible stage of human development – the trauma of self consciousness.
But God wants us to grow up. To continue the parental metaphor, no good Father wants a child to depend on him, but to become a good Father too.
Remember, Jesus in Luke 12:34: where your treasure is, there your heart will be. What you put your highest value onto is for all practical purposes what you become.
We have a choice. Either to be like British Victorian Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, who said religion is a very good thing as long as it never interferes with your private life, OR to live the personal life so deeply that it expands into resurrection truths beyond itself.
To fear not, as angels always say, whenever they turn up in the Bible. Because Christians who do let religion interfere with their private lives have discovered love, not fear.
This is really important.
Many times, Jesus said the Kingdom of Heaven is close at hand, in fact it is within you, and you are the light of the world.
So, let’s draw some conclusions!
…If Jesus says you are the light of the world, and the author of the gospel of John says that in God, there is no darkness, then who are you?
In non-judgmental awareness, and by being alert, as Jesus says, by judging not, by repenting, which doesn’t mean grovelling but waking up, the beast can become man, man can become angelic, and the angel, once fully healed, can become I am, the way the truth and the life.
God is close, which is why Jesus called God Abba, an intimate Aramaic word more like Daddy than a comfortably removed Father, a Monarch, or even worse, a Judge. Judge not, Jesus said, God’s consciousness can grow in us, as if smaller than the smallest mustard seed but growing larger than the largest plant, teaching us our enemy is a projection of our own fear, and our neighbour is an extension of our self.
Which is why Jesus parables often begin with a: "who of you doesn't know this already?" We really do, but it isn’t very comfortable to realise it, it is cosier to go back to sleep.
Recall the words of retiring Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “I am not certain Christianity can flourish where people are comfortable. We need a modicum of suffering to realise what it means to belong to the Church.”
So we need to penetrate fear through constant awareness, in order to disarm and be resurrected. A BBC programme called the Big Silence has just ended, which has been showing five people as they are filmed entering monastic silence for the first time. One of them is scared of the silence, as we may be scared of God, but when he experiences the silence, it is a revelation to him that the fear of silence is actually in people, not in the silence.
To be resurrected we must die to self and evolve into God, even if the tradition is an obstacle. The theological construct that God would require the bloody sacrifice of Jesus so as to be able to forgive us our sins is as bizarre as it is repulsive. It is in the tradition, yes, but so is child sacrifice. Jesus lived for our sins.
Jesus ended our alienation and our separation. Jesus re-defined the world’s understanding of what it is to be human, and threatened vested interests. Jesus only died for our sins because he lived for them, and he still does live for them, in consciousness.
Despite the tradition, I don’t love Jesus Christ because I feel inadequate or guilty or fearful about the fire, or because I think you should. I am not even sure you should worship the fire-maker, and here is why.
Our truest nature, the open centre inside all our personalities, expresses everything else that is... the spiral galaxies above us when we walk on the beach, the spiral shells on that same beach which we walk on, the spiral fingerprints on our hands as we hold them, and the spiral DNA helix inside our suffering flesh. Philosopher Heraclitus and author of John’s gospel called this fire ‘Logos’, the wisdom of God. And we need to become, not merely worship, wisdom incarnate.
You are not a small wave in a great sea, you are a great sea knowing itself in a small wave.
You are not a human being having a spiritual experience, you are a spiritual being having human experiences.
In resurrection, if we get there, name and form does not matter so much. Maybe we only get there because it does not matter. Maybe we are only important because a loving intelligence called I am can know itself through us, we who are the latecomers in a very long process of physical evolution. Despite what happened to Gallileo, we now know that our planet is not at the centre of the world, it moves around one hot star among billions of stars, in a universe among possibly billions of universes.
We are not at the centre of things, and below the atomic level, they say, God seems to be more real than we are. So Jesus was a religious revolution because he came into a culture where holiness was up there and out there - separate - and he realised that a God who is over a chasm up a power pyramid, anywhere but here in fact, is no God at all.
TO CONCLUDE - Our 1st spiritual step is our belief, our interior conviction in a higher power, an other, not us, not another one of us, but an Other with a capital O. But belief is not enough.
If Jesus had had a parrot, he might have taught it to say: “Help, they’ve turned me into a parrot.” Jesus doesn’t want the parroting of belief, but a transformation into experience. It is in the gospels. “Not everyone who says to me: 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom.” (Matt 7:21).
SO THEN - our second spiritual step, is handing our life over to God, to be what we might not imagine we want to be, because prayer doesn’t change God, it dissolves the judge who is in us. We don’t merely believe in this Other with a capital O, we try to let God become us.
In the final step, the resurrection, which Sadducees didn’t believe in, there is no other… there is One.
In the name of Father Son and Holy Spirit, Amen +
