When Jesus appeared to his disciples following his resurrection, he was both like he was before his death and different. On the day of his resurrection itself, Jesus appeared to the disciples at various times and places when it was physical impossible to be at so many different places in one day. His glorified body didn’t seem to have the same limitations his earthly body possessed before his resurrection. We are told that he was able to appear and disappear, travel great distances, and pass through the wall or the locked door of a house. As a result, St Paul writes about an earthly body and a resurrection body with continuities and differences between the two.
Resurrection, it seems, is not simply a continuation of our current experience but a new dimension of living. Jurgen Moltmann reflects this idea when he says, the “resurrection of Christ does not mean a new possibility within the world and its history, but a new possibility altogether for the world, for existence, and for history.” Jesus gave us a hint of this, too, is his response to the Sadducees that we read about in today’s Gospel reading (Mark 12.18-27). Those who are resurrected, Jesus says, neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.
We don’t know what it is like to inhabit a resurrected body or live a resurrected life, as the Bible just gives the sense that there are similarities and differences, continuities and changes. As a result, it is unhelpful to speculate about that future. So, what can we say about the nature of relationship in eternity on the basis of Jesus’ response to the Sadducees?
In following Jesus, we follow someone who posed some very significant challenges to our understanding of the place of family. "The obligation to bury one’s father was regarded by many Jews of Jesus’ time as the most holy and binding duty of a son; but Jesus says that that is secondary to the call to follow him and announce God’s kingdom" (Luke 9. 51 - 62). This call cuts across family life and our traditional understandings of family.
In Matthew 12, when Jesus was told that his mother and brothers were nearby, we read that he said: "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? … Whoever does what my Father in heaven wants is my brother, my sister, and my mother." Then in Matthew 10 we read of Jesus saying: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the world. No, I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. I came to set sons against their fathers, daughters against their mothers, daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law; your worst enemies will be the members of your own family."
Tom Wright notes in his commentary on this passage that Jesus is quoting from the prophet Micah (Micah 7.6) who predicts the terrible divisions that will always occur when God does a new thing. "Jesus came to bring and establish the new way of being God’s people, and not surprisingly those who were quite happy with the old one, thank you very much, didn’t like it being disturbed." "He didn’t want to bring division within households for the sake of it," Wright says, but "he knew that, if people followed his way, division was bound to follow."
Jesus, himself, did not marry and had no physical offspring. As we have seen, his emphasis was on his followers as his family, rather than his blood and adoptive relatives. His death was for the entire family of God - all people everywhere – and, as we are noting today, he taught that after the resurrection people will neither marry or be given in marriage.
Through his resurrection, Jesus has gone ahead of us in signing and establishing the Kingdom of God and he does so as the forerunner for ourselves. He was experiencing what we will later experience ourselves. The Kingdom of God, of which the resurrection is the first fruits, will be a place of equality and inclusion. In Jesus’ ministry, as Peter Rollins has pointed out, "we find a multitude of references to one who challenged the divisions that were seen as sacred, divisions between Jew and Gentile, male and female, and slave and free. Jesus spoke to tax collectors, engaged with Samaritans and treated women as equals in a world where these were outrageous acts." Jesus, for example, refused to perpetuate the divisions between Jews and Samaritans when his own disciples want to see revenge enacted on a Samaritan village for rejecting them.
More than this, though, in his incarnation we are presented with a picture of God, in Jesus, being progressively stripped of all his prior identity as God’s Son. Rollins writes that, "This is called kenosis and describes the act of self-emptying. This is most vividly expressed in the crucifixion, where we see Christ occupying the place of the complete outsider, embracing the life of one who is excluded from the political system, the religious community, and the cultural network."
To do this is to cut through the divisions which exist in society because of our different identities. This is what Jesus meant when he said he brought a sword into the world. He cut into "the very heart of all tribal allegiances, bringing unity to what was previously divided":
"There is no change biologically (male or female), religiously (Jew or Greek) or politically (slave or free). Yet nothing remains the same, for these identities are now drained of their operative power and no longer hold us in the way that they once did. These identities no longer need to separate us from each other."
Our "concrete identity continues to exist, but it is now held differently and does not dictate the scope and limitations of one’s being.” As a result, St Paul suggests “We are no longer to act as though we are defined by the things we own, the things that happen to us, or the relationships we have. While these continue to be important, we must hold them in a way that ensures they do not have an inescapable grasp upon us.” “Paul understands this radical cut as emanating directly from one’s identity with Christ, for Paul understands participation in the life of Christ as involving the loss of power that our various tribal identities once held for us."
At the Eucharist we commemorate the act in which Jesus let go of every identity by which he was known, becoming nothing, in order that we might come into a new life within the family or kingdom of God where all are one and where there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female.
Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of a new way of being human – a way of being human that ultimately knows no death, no grief, no crying, no pain, no inequality and no exclusion. Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of the healing and renewal of human beings, human society and the entire world. That is the meaning of the resurrection. That is where we, and our world, can be heading, if we follow in the footsteps of Jesus. That is what Jesus is indicating to us when he taught that after the resurrection people will neither marry or be given in marriage.
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Anawim - Give Us The Peace.
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