TRANSLATION MATTHEW 22: 23

On that day Sudducees ( who say there is no resurrection) came to him and asked, “Teacher, Moses said: If a man dies without children, his brother must marry the wife and raise up seed for his brother. Now in our story there were seven brothers. And the first married and since he died without children left his wife to his brother. The second did the same and the third down to the seventh. Last of all the woman died. So in the resurrection whose wife will she be out of the seven, since they all had her?”

Jesus answered them,,”You are wide of the truth, because you neither know the scriptures nor the power of God.; for in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the messengers in heaven. And as regards the resurrection from the dead, have you not read the word of God to you, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob”? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” And the crowds who heard this were stunned by his teaching.

.

The Sadducees’ story is a fun number, and demolishes the view of those who see heaven as a kind of happier replay of worldly existence. This is now the dominant view in Scotland, with families envisaging their dead continuing their favourite pastimes in heaven. And of course we will all meet up again one day.

Jesus reply kicks this cosy nonsense into the long grass. The life beyond this life is utterly different, it is life with God. This is both a splendid promise and a devastating contradiction to popular piety. Would a priest or minister teach this doctrine at a funeral?

Then Jesus takes the pious designation of God as the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob as a declaration of the aliveness of these Patriarchs: God, who is life, cannot relate to anything that is dead.

In our time process theology insists that God relates to everything in the universe, which means that every particle is alive.