Luke 20.27-38
Beethoven wrote nine symphonies. His ninth is so stupendous that you couldn’t imagine what could possibly follow it. Imagine someone discovers a long-lost score of his 10th Symphony, and a friend of yours has just been to the first performance. Your friend tries to describe to you what the music is like. The attempt unsurprisingly is hopeless – you have to hear it – there’s no way round that. Many things in life have to be experienced – they can’t be put into words.
The Sadducees were people who thought that God’s mysteries could simply be put into words. They held strictly to the written Scriptures of the Torah. The Pharisees on the other hand, for all their faults, were more imaginative thatn that. They knew that our understanding of God’s truth develops as we go along. So they believed in the developing tradition, and the growing collection of commentaries on Scriptures. This developing tradition had led people to believe in the resurrection of the dead. The Sadducees pooh-poohed that. They were priests of the Temple, and belonged to the wealthy elite of Jerusalem. They treasured birth and social position, and like many elites, such as the wealthy in 18th-century Britain, they had a prosaic, worldly attitude to life and society, with little sense of social responsibility. They cared little for idealism or for empathy. ON this day we remember countless people, many of them young, who have died in many wars, and continue to die today. Wars are usually started by people who look a lot like Sadducees of their time. Worldly, cynical, not interested in principle. Putin probably pooh-poohs the resurrection too.
In today’s gospel we have an encounter between such people and Jesus. We can imagine the Sadducees telling their cynical little story with a smirk. Come on now, tell us how this supposed resurrection life can make sense. Jesus give his devastating reply: the big question is not what the resurrection life is like. We can’t know until we experience it. The question is a ridiculous one, like expecting a description of Beethoven’s 10th Symphony. The real question is about what you see in people, and in the people of God. What you see in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, in the great figures of God’s people. With Abraham and Isaac Jesus is conjuring up the life and aspirations of a whole people. Great figures, like the Saints, have the potential to fire something up in us. They also give us a powerful sense of the people to which we belong; and not only the great figures – there are just as much the ordinary inspiring people we see today in the life of the church all around us. There is where you need to look for the answer to the question about heaven. God doesn’t raise up those marvelleous people just to squelch them. We csee in them somethings that is bigger than all of us. Christians can think of Augustine, or Francis or St Teresa, or John Henry Newman, or any of the multitude of the saints. What we see in them, and in the ordinary saints of every day, is the place to look for the answer to our question.
Jesus is drawing us into the world of the imagination. The word “imagination” is used in several ways. It can mean dreaming up things that don’t exist; it can mean having fantasies like Walter Mitty. When imagination goes astray, it needs to be corrected by reason and experience. But the true world of the imagination is the glory of being human. Albert Einstein had learning difficulties. He couldn’t speak till he was five. He suffered from dyslexia. How did he manage to revolutionise the world of physics? He said about it that “the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for taking in people’s thinking … I don’t think in words … I imagine ideas, and I attach words to them later.” Our imagination can pick things up before we can put them into words. Imagination generates movements in our soul that pull us in a certain direction. It is to be contrasted with pseudo-science which simply observes and calculates. Real science swims in the things it is exploring. Gerard Manley Hopkins said the imagination means what he called an ecstasy of interest. That seems to be just what Einstein was talking about. The need to intuit things. It’s not enough to have sorted a problem on paper. You have to ask how far it feels right. So Cardinal Newman could say that “for assent to be adequate, it must first be credible to the imagination”.
Ian McGilChrist writes in his books about the right side of the brain as the home of our intuitions and our holistic grasping of things, and the left side of the brain as the calculator. For him, the left side has taken over in our modern society. Education, politics, and, yes, the church, are full of pseudo-science and pseudo-expertise, where people fail to swim in the things they are dealing with, to breathe with their imaginations. We are faced with a Sadducaic world. The arts are seen as mere icing on the cake, not deserving finance when money is short. In schools, in universities, and in the daily life of our society, the arts are suffering. But the arts and the humanities are essential to living life with full awareness, swimming in the greater truth.
The first letter of John speaks of “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands”. Just as with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, we have seen and heard and touched Jesus. The source of our confidence and knowledge is there. As for the future, after we have died, St Paul tells us “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him”.