Sunday 10 November 2019
- Bible Book:
- Luke
'And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.' (vs. 37-38)
Psalm: Psalm 17:1-9
Background
It’s easy to say that this is an old argument, and also to look down on the Sadducees as hopeless sceptics, which they weren’t. The question of resurrection, or The Resurrection, is still a live one, and not because we live in a sceptical age but because, as much as it is offered as The Answer, it raises a whole lot of questions. Around Easter this year there was a ‘resurrection war’ on Twitter with people getting very heated and condemning each other for their views on whether Christ’s resurrection was physical or not and if this is a marker of a Christian, with much use of 1 Corinthians 15.
Christians have many different beliefs and nothing is going to change that, we don’t have any right to excommunicate each other when in fact it’s time to listen to each other. I almost hesitate to mention him but Bishop David Jenkins got into tremendous trouble in the mid-1980s, some saying that he was in trouble with God after lightning hit York Minster (!). He made the point, much misquoted and misrepresented in both media and pulpits, even many years later, that Christ’s resurrection was "more than a conjuring trick with bones'. It’s better to give it a lot of thought and ask many questions than confront people with an intolerant position; the stories, encounters and people we meet through Jesus in the Gospels cannot be transplanted directly to today and we need to step back from hitting people with proof texts.
To Ponder:
- What does ‘resurrection’ mean to you?
- What kind of conversations and relationships do you have with those who think and believe differently?