The passage: God is not a God of the dead but of the living, for to him all are alive.
It is a recurring perplexity in our Lord’s teaching that he is too simple for us. While we puzzle over the design of Solomon’s earring on some gold-plated temple door, he speaks of the foundations of Mount Zion, and of the earth beneath. If we suppose he was making a verbal argument against the Sadducees (“I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; therefore they are”), we will wonder that no Sadducee had the courage to answer: “God only meant to introduce himself to Moses as the God who had protected his fathers while they lived. They found me faithful; so will you.”
But no such reply occurred even to the Sadducees of that day, for their eastern minds could see argument beyond logic. Shall God call himself the God of the dead, of those once alive whom he could not or would not keep alive? Is that Godhood? A changeless God over an ever-born, ever-perishing torrent of life, each atom of which cries My God! and passes straight into the Godless cold! “Trust me, for I looked after your fathers once. I will be good to you for seventy years or so, and when you are no more and the world goes on without you, I will still call myself your God.” God does not change; once God, always God. If he has once told a man “I am your God,” and that man has died the death of the Sadducee’s creed, then we may say God is the God of the dead.
“But why should he not be the God of the dead in that sense, if while they lived here he was the faithful God of the living?” What Godlike relation can the ever-living, changeless God have to creatures who share nothing of his life, who have death at their core, who are not worth keeping alive? To let them die would be to change, to renounce his Godhood; and if they are not worth keeping alive, his creating is a poor thing, and he is less divine than even his dying creatures have imagined him. But our Lord says, “All live unto him.” With him death is not. Your life, O Lord, sees our life; you think of us eternally more than we think of you. If you forgot us for a moment, death would be. The beloved pass from our sight, not from yours. What we call death is only a form in men’s eyes; it looks final, and nothing beyond seems probable. But if God could see us before we were, and make us after his ideal, our passing from our friends’ sight is no argument that he beholds us no longer. However great the change, it is not against reason to hope that God saw Abraham after Isaac ceased to see him, Isaac after Jacob ceased, and Jacob after some Sadducees doubted there ever was a Jacob. He remembers them, that is, carries them in his mind, and he of whom God thinks, lives. The Living One, whose Godhood lies in giving life, cannot name himself Their God after the dead; so they must be alive. If he remembers his loving thoughts of them, would he not have kept them alive if he could? And if he could not, how could he create them? Is it easier to call into life than to keep alive?
“But if they live to God, they are aware of God and conscious of their own being. Why then is a resurrection needed?”
For their relation to the other children of God in mutual revelation, and for a fresh revelation of God to all. But what is meant by the resurrection of the body? “With what body do they come?”
Surely we are not required to believe that the same body is raised. That is against science, common sense, and Scripture; St Paul puts it quite otherwise. It is childish to argue it. Who could wish his material body, which has died over and over since he was born and never stays made of the same matter for an hour, to be fixed as his changeless possession just as it is at death, and kept in worthless identity for ages? At death the body will be to a man’s consciousness no more than an old garment thrown aside at night for a new and better one in the morning. To want to keep it argues a sensual materialism excusable only in pagans who, with only a thin, dreamy, funeral existence to hope for in their Elysian fields, might long for the thicker bodily life they had known above. A Christian might as well want all the hair ever cut from his head restored to his risen head.
Yet the Resurrection is a gladdening doctrine, like a silver trumpet, and as needful as breath to our longing souls. Let us know what it means, and we shall see how precious it is.
Let us first ask what this body is for. It is the means of revelation to us, the camera in which God’s eternal shows are set forth. Through it we meet Nature and our fellow men and their revelations of God, and learn the lessons of passion, suffering, love, beauty, and science. Through it we are trained outward from ourselves and driven inward to find God in our deepest selves. There is glory and might in this vital evanescence, this ever-uptossed rainbow of tangible humanity, and it is no less God’s making than the spirit it clothes.
We cannot yet have learned all we are meant to learn through the body. How much of even this world’s teaching can the most diligent man exhaust before he must leave it? Is all that remains to be lost? Who that has loved this earth can doubt that the spiritual body St Paul speaks of will be a higher channel of such revelation? The meek, who have inherited the earth, see all matter radiant with spiritual meaning, and would not sigh over mere animal pleasure, would, I think, be least willing to be without a body, to be unclothed without being clothed upon. Who, after centuries of glory in heaven, would not rejoice to see the meek snowdrop once more? Whom, among the golden choirs, would an old sunset not move to a song the ancient dwellers on earth would hush their harps to hear?
All this revelation, however, would make only a body necessary, not this body, and would ill meet the fulness of the word Resurrection. We need a body not only to convey revelation to us but to reveal us to others. Our inward thoughts and feelings need garments that make the unseen world within us manifest to our brothers and sisters; otherwise each is left in human loneliness. If my body served this use before, the new body must be like the old: the same body, glorified as we are, with all that distinguished each of us more visible than ever. The accidental, nonessential, unrevealing, and incomplete will be gone; what made the body what it was to those who loved us will be there tenfold. Is this not the resurrection of the body, the same body though not the same dead matter? Every eye shall see the beloved, every heart cry, “My own again! More mine because more himself than ever I saw him!” On earth we say, “He is not himself today,” or “She looks her own self,” and that is when the heart is glad and the face radiant. For we carry a better likeness of our friends in our hearts than their faces, except at precious seasons, show us.
Who will dare call anything less than this a resurrection? Oh, how the letter kills! Some can believe the dirt of their bodies will rise as it went down to the grave, yet doubt whether they will know their friends. And they call that believing in the resurrection!
What! Shall a man love his neighbour as himself, and be content not to know him in heaven? Better to lose our own consciousness. What! Shall God be the God of earth’s families, and the love he created in us for parents, brothers, sisters, wife and child go longing for ever, or, far worse, die out of our hearts? Shall God be God, and this be the end?
Ah, my friends! What will resurrection or life be to me, how shall I go on loving God as I learned to love him through you, if he cares so little for this human heart as to take from me the gracious visits of your faces and forms? True, I might gaze at Jesus now and then, but he would not be so good as I had thought. And how should I see him if I could not see you? God has not taken you from me to bury you in the abyss of his own being, where I could not follow and find you, lost myself in the same gulf. No, our God is a revealing God. He will raise you from the dead that I may behold you, looking out of the same eyes of eternal love and truth, holding out the same strong hands of brotherhood and sisterhood to me, who knew and loved you. I shall not care that the matter of the forms I loved long ago has gone to mingle with the workings of God’s science on some far-off world, or that the muscle now sending the ichor through your veins is not made of the particles that once fed the brain, the eye, the arm, so long as it is yourselves before me, beloved, my own loving souls of old, with garments of revealing after their old lovely fashion. The new shall be dear as the old, because it reveals the old love. And in the changes that must come when the mortal puts on immortality, shall we not feel that the nobler our friends are, the more they are themselves? The more each one’s idea is carried out in perfect beauty, the more they are like what we thought them in our most exalted moods, in rare moments of deepest communion, and through the veil of their imperfections when we loved them truest.
Lord, always give us this Resurrection, like your own in the body of your Transfiguration. Let us see, hear, and know, and be seen, heard, and known, as you do. Give us glorified bodies to reveal the glorified thoughts that will then inhabit us, when not only will you reveal God, but each of us will reveal you.
And for this, Lord Jesus, come, you the child, the obedient God, that we may be one with you, and with every man and woman you have made, in the Father.