Fr. J. D. Ousley

Doctrines matter.

It makes a difference what people believe. While we should be as tolerant of different beliefs as we can, not every belief is tolerable.

Next month, in the light of the terrorist attacks, Christians will want to ponder the traditional Advent teaching about death and judgment and heaven and hell.

Whether or not the terrorists were following genuine Islamic teaching, their actions certainly weren't consistent with a Christian understanding of these doctrines. We can't believe that God rewards those who murder the innocent; whatever Heaven is like that's not it!

So, too, we will want to pay particular attention tot today's Gospel lesson, which is also about Heaven. Although the story reflects an ancient debate that was occurring in Israel at the time of Jesus, it is this sort of debate that led to the formulation of the Christian document.

It's also remarkable that the theological issues which separate modern Christians from fundamentalist Moslems are foreshadowed by the argument Jesus finds himself when he defends his idea of Heaven. As we consider this debate, then -- and as our soldiers risk their lives to defend us against suicidal fanatics with a warped and perverse view of the afterlife, this Bible controversy has more than academic interest.

So, at the time of Jesus, one group of Jewish scholars -- the Sadducees -- held the traditional Hebrew belief that there was no individual life after death. People "lived on" in their children, or in the nation of Israel, but not as individuals in Heaven.

Another group of intellectuals, who were called Pharisees, believed that human souls could survive death and go on to a spiritual realm.

This disagreement about immortality leads up to today's Gospel story. The Sadducees propose a test case which they say disproves the doctrine of immortality.

Under the Jewish law, if a woman's husband died, she was supposed to marry her husband's brother. (Although this was constricting on the widow, it did guarantee that she and her children would be looked after. This custom protected women in a society that had little public welfare.)

In the test case, the Sadducees propose that a woman marries seven brothers, one after the other. All the brothers have the misfortune of dying! Thus, in theory, the woman would wind up having seven husbands when she reached Heaven. The Sadducees thus argued that immortal life would be so confusing that it must be impossible!

Now in this dispute, Jesus sides with the Pharisees. He, too, believes that there is a life after death. But Jesus suggests to the Sadducees that the afterlife will be radically unlike life in this world.

Jesus says that "those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage."

Heaven will be joyous, but its joys won't be clouded with the social complications that mar life on earth.

Now it's crucial to notice how cautious Jesus is about describing Heaven. Positively, Jesus only teaches that in the afterlife, people "are like angels" -- which is another way of saying that the possessiveness of marriage won't be found in the spiritual age that follows death.

As one commentator remarks, "marriage as a means of propagating the human species is irrelevant in heaven."

Now it's worth noting that while members of the Pharisee faction believed in life after death, they didn't take a very spiritual view of Heaven. One writer in the Pharisee party speculated that in Heaven, a woman would be able to bear a child every day! Many women would regard that prospect with less than unbounded enthusiasm ...

Such an overly-literal view is seen in those visions of heaven as a city with streets paved with gold. And in fundamentalist Islam, here is the notorious promise Muslim theologians make to male suicide bombers: the theologians promise that as soon as the terrorist acts are over and the so-called "martyrs" arrive in Heaven, each one of them will be given "72 virgins."

Of course, visions of the next life aren't in themselves bad. The greatest religious writers have them; the author of the last book in the Bible, the Revelation of St. John, talks of heavenly streets paved with gold.

But literalist thinking limits a person's ideas to the products of his or her imagination. And, in the case of the Islamic terrorists, the limitations are tragic for all concerned.

Christ's teaching forces us to go beyond our individual ideas.

Confined by our own experience, we might well think that Heaven would give us a life more or less the same as this one -- with wives and husbands and childbirth.

Jesus helps us transcend these limitations. Since the communion we share with God is so powerful that it goes beyond death, our relationship will take new forms that we couldn't even describe in the language of this world. Thus, while we can say that we will be "like angels," we can't really know what this spiritual state would be.

Heaven isn't just a spruced-up version of earth! A visitor to our church the other day was admiring all the portraits of angels we have in our stained glass and around the altar. The visitor then asked me at the door, "Do angels ever get tired?"

Well, I suspect that they don't! As far as I can tell, angels are spiritual creatures, and being pure spirit, they wouldn't be weighed down by physical bodies and physical fatigue.

More important, though, it seems likely that, like marriage, "work" in Heaven would be indescribably different from work on earth.

Yet if the Pharisees in the Gospel lesson have limited imaginations, the Sadducees' minds are even more closed. For because immortality presents challenges to ordinary thinking, Sadducees wanted to scrap the belief entirely.

Skeptics today make the same mistake. They think, for example, that the sciences don't give us any grounds for believing that human persons survive death. And since they would hesitate to believe anything that wasn't supported by science, they reject the idea of immortality.

I would argue that these skeptics should use their imaginations. Who knows what the next world will be like? None of the sciences can "explain" persons in this world! How can we expect science to explain personal existence in the next life?

However, Christian philosophers have imagined all kinds of possibilities for eternal life. Life after death could be largely mental, for example, with persons communicating by exchanging thoughts instead of speaking.

So while Heaven probably doesn't have streets paved with gold, personal existence could continue after physical death. And when we reject the nonsense that limited minds have produced about immortality we are free to contemplate the promises of God.

For God promises life -- life in all its fullness. As Jesus concludes his story: "God is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all [of the children of God] are alive."

And now unto God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit be ascribed as is most justly due all might, majesty, power, dominion and praise, now and forever, Amen.