St Paul’s Cathedral
A Sermon by The Very Reverend Dr Trevor James
Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral
Text: Luke 20: 27-38
Preached at Choral Eucharist 10 November 2013
This gospel passage is one that always make me grin. In fact I maintain that the
instinctive grin it evokes is a physical clue as to how we should read it – the sense
of farce and the ridiculous is quite deliberate and we need to take note.
One web writer who I enjoy has commented on this gospel with an anecdote of his
own. He says:
A missionary meets a cannibal, and it does not go well. He is eaten. But the cannibal is
so impressed by the demeanour of the missionary as he awaits death, that he is
converted. So how will these two be raised from the dead? Part of the missionary
would have to be part of the cannibal! This was the gist of an atheist pamphlet which
triumphantly concluded it had so ridiculed the notion of resurrection, and its logical
knots and impossibilities, that I could not possibly continue to believe.
Now when we listen to the Sadducees in this Gospel we are hearing also our own
scepticism about the resurrection. Let’s be honest about this – when we talk about
resurrection we encounter our own incomprehension of what it means. So,
lingering with the Sadducees for a moment (as with the missionary and the
cannibal story), wee the problem that if we use our world, our lived experience, as
the measure for what resurrection means – then such questions as the Sadducees’
are asking are real, and the concept seems ridiculous.
But Jesus’ response to the Sadducees is clear and uncompromising: they are asking
an absurd question because the resurrection is another reality entirely. We have no
language for it, no way of describing it, and no adequate concept to account for it at
all. We cannot describe the life of the resurrection in terms of the life that we know
– we are dealing with different realities so no analogy can possibly apply.
Analogical thinking has its limitations. It cannot help us with a reality that is
utterly beyond our experience; it will mislead us. In fact most of the popular
images of God, the concepts that are used to trivialise and belittle religious faith are
based upon our inappropriate but habitual use of analogy. A lot of our images of
God in religious art exemplify this – we make God look human, just a supreme and
wonderful version of ourselves.
I’ll illustrate how one well known and very popular religious thinker has tried to
help us get past the distortions that analogy causes: I refer to C.S. Lewis and the
Narnia stories. Have you ever wondered why he represents God through the figure
of the lion Aslan? Well, I think the simple fact is that the figure of the lion compels
us to approach it differently – we don’t and can’t quite fit the image of the lion into
the ‘human’ ways we tend to think of God. Aslan is a powerful presence but
certainly is not contained by our human frame of reference. The image helps
correct our faulty thinking and imagining. Aslan reminds us that God is utterly
different to us and far more than we can imagine.
In this gospel Jesus does not tell us anything much about the resurrection but he
certainly tells us what it is not. Of those who die he simply says ‘they are like
angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.’ He says
something more in John’s Gospel where, without any attempt to describe what
resurrection is, he simply and with very homely imagery, affirms that we are held
within the loving care of God. You will remember the passage in John 14 where he
says ‘In my Father’s house are many rooms … I go to prepare a room for you.’
All talk of the resurrection requires that we abandon fixed ideas about what it is
like and instead accept that a resurrection faith means that we trust in God’s love
and care for us, and in a divine purpose that holds firm within the whole of
creation, with an end and reality beyond all our imagining. The apostle Paul,
though sometimes over-inclined to describe what the resurrection might be like,
grasped this when he wrote in 1Corinthians 2:
But, as it is written,
‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the human heart conceived,
what God has prepared for those who love him’—
2