The Jews believed in the resurrection of the dead. What does this mean and where did it come from? Well, this first reading that Sean did from the Book of Maccabees is important because for the first time in the Jews’ history, around 160 B.C.E., the belief in the resurrection of the dead arose. Up to that time, for the prior thousand years, the Jews believed that when you died you were dead and that was the end of it – finished. But with the Book of Maccabees and the political situation of that time, this changed. What was the political situation? Well, the Jews had been occupied by foreign powers for the prior five to six hundred years. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, somebody was always in charge. Next, it was the Greeks under Alexander the Great and then, after his death, his empire went to many different hands. Finally, a Syrian, Antiochus Epiphanes, ends up being in charge of the Jews. And for reasons unclear to me at least, Antiochus hated the Jews and wanted to destroy Judaism, right in the heart of Judaism, which of course was Jerusalem. So, as you saw in the readings, he wanted people to eat ritually impure food (pork); he destroyed copies of the Torah; and, desecrated the Temple. He had a systematic program for exterminating Judaism right in the middle of Israel. So, it is not too surprising, that there was a kind of insurrection against that, led by a family called Maccabees. And a three-year war ensued in which, during one of the rare times in their history, the Jews actually won and were subsequently in charge for about ninety years.

In the Book of Maccabees that describe the war, for the first time it dawned on the Jews to ask: "What is going on here?" The problem for the Jews was this: In the course of their history, the most privileged description of God was signified by the Hebrew work "Hesed". In the Roman alphabet it would be spelled H-e-s-e-d.

So, what is the problem? All right, here you have all of these dead Jews in the course of this very brutal war and here was God. These Jews had died in the cause of God, for the sake of God. And so, some bright Jew thought: "Well, maybe God is steadfastly loving not just so long as we are alive, but maybe even beyond death". And it is out of that religious problem that they had – "Is God steadfastly loving even to those who have died?" – that they came up with the notion of the resurrection of the dead. It is also helpful to remember that the Jews did not have souls. That is, the notion of soul was alien to the Jews. That was a Greek invention and had nothing to do with Judaism. So, the Jews thought that if God was going to be faithful, then the question was, "To whom is God going to be faithful?" They had to have a body. A person without a body was unthinkable for them. So, we have the resurrection of the body and that is where all this comes from.

But the crucial thing here is that the desire for life after death was not some kind of wish-fulfillment, or some kind of terror in the face of death. The Jews were very much unlike us in that they were totally unsentimental about death. They saw that after you died, you turned into dust or worm food, or whatever. Then you were gone and that was the end of it. So, it was precisely on the basis of their belief as to who God was that they come to believe that God was going to be faithful even after death. And that is the resurrection of the dead. And as we see, even in this passage from Luke, not all the Jews believed that. The Pharisees did and this is one of the great points of argumentation between the two groups. So that is the point of this Sadducee question to Jesus about who was going to be the husband of this lady.

So, when the Jews came to believe that this one Jew, Jesus, had been raised by God from the dead, what did that mean? It means that the followers of Jesus believed that Jesus was the absolute perfection of a human steadfastly loving God, to which God responded, as steadfastly loving. God therefore raised Jesus to what human life is supposed to be: a life with God. That is the whole business of being alive for them: whether you were alive or whether you were dead, you lived for God, with God. And it also meant that this was the beginning of the end-time; that if God raised this Jew then the Kingdom of Israel was going to be restored and God was going to come and work justice on the earth and that was going to be the end of everything.

That is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with us? Because I think most of us, most of the time, live quite happily without any thought of resurrection from the dead at all. Well, maybe when somebody we know dies or a parent dies, then it may be a passing thought. But I think that for most of us the resurrection of the dead is not so far from what Gertrude Stein said it was: "Pie in the sky when we die by and by". It really does not make a whole lot of difference. Why? Because life is full enough is it not? We have all kinds of stuff to do. We have ambitions, plans, and designs on the future. Who needs the resurrection of the dead? The fact that, often enough, those ambitions, plans and designs do not have much to do with God is simply illustrative of the point.

But it gets worse than that. I am old enough to be the grandfather of virtually everybody in this room. And let me tell you what it looks like from the age of sixty-three. You live, you try, you work hard, and you have this vision of the possibilities of human community and goodness. And you find that over and over that stuff breaks down. I have even seen this in twenty-year-olds too: a terrible, almost paralyzing sense of the futility of things. Nothing changes. And it is true, I have been around three times as long as most of you and not much changes in the world. Are we more humane today? Is the world a richer place in terms of its humanity? And what have I done to change that? I have tried a little bit, but not much has happened; truly, not much has happened. And so a process of attrition simply sets in and we just get tired: "What difference does it make?" Ostensibly, it makes very little difference. And so the doctrine, or the belief in the resurrection of the dead, becomes more vague and remote in peoples’ real experience, their real lives. I mean, you can look at the Church often enough and it looks like we will go on forever because we have all of the bureaucracy in place. We get Pope after Pope and bishop after bishop, etc. We are kind of running on automatic pilot and it will go on forever.

Well, I would like to make just a couple of suggestions. And these suggestions are going to fit differently depending on where you are in your life. Although I would like to think that even at the age of twenty you found out that loving is an inordinately difficult enterprise. Becoming non-pathologically selfless, truly generous without looking out for what is in it for you, without looking for some payback sooner or later, is hugely difficult. And the world, in fact, is very intractable. Those of you who have perhaps used a lot of energy and time in trying to make things better know the fragility of anything that you build or any effort that you make.

What talk about the resurrection can mean, is this: That all of our plans, all of our making sense of life, all of our desire that life be calculable, manageable, and intelligible, are inadequate. We are deficient, yes God has plans other than ours. And I think that we are so busy with our own, but because we do not believe, at very deep places in our life, that God’s plan is really going to work out. We are supposedly going to be the Communion of Saints: everybody in this room together with the billions of people on this planet, at this moment, and everybody who has ever lived. That is what the resurrection of the dead said. And that is why this is so implausible.

So, one of the things that is here is that we need very much to not only revise our ideas of what life is, but of who God is, what God is interested in, and what God can do despite us. There ought to be a kind of humility that is born in us from thinking about the resurrection of the dead. Mother Theresa, at one point, put it very aptly; "We are not called to be successful. We are called to be faithful". It sounds so cute. As long as you can see it pasted up on the wall: "Oh, that sounds very clever! Oh, that is a great idea!" Do it! Try it! Live it day in and day out! It is not all so simple. So, the resurrection of the dead says, "All right, I am not in charge of this. I am not even in charge of my own life, much less the world". The resurrection of the dead says that the God I believe in offers me a hope much larger than the tiny, sometime infantile hopes that I have for myself and the world.

Finally, there is another line that strikes me the older that I get. It is a line from the First letter of John: "If our heart condemns us, God is greater than our hearts". What does that mean? Well, we could talk about sin and morality but I think that there is something more significant and profound embodied in that text; that despite our frustrations, disappointments, and the futility of so much of what we do, God is still there. God is greater than my hopes, my ambitions, my plans, my capacity to make sense of life – all of this nice reasonableness that we, especially at the University, put so much stock in. We really do live our lives surrounded by a mystery greater than ourselves, offering us prospects and possibilities much more astonishingly wonderful than we ever come up with or on the basis of our own experience. This is the real God to hope in and not just the God that we would like to make out of our heads. And that is really important.