Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question, ‘Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.’
Jesus said to them, ‘Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but 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. Indeed they cannot die any more, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.’
It rather looks like the Church of England ignores Remembrance Sunday when it comes to choosing Bible readings. There is a reason for that, of course. The Church of England tries as far as possible to follow a lectionary it shares with churches all over the world. Remembrance Sunday is a not a worldwide reflection on war. It is a national reflection which is also recognised to a greater or lesser extent in those countries that were previously part of the British Empire.
I wonder which passages we would pick from the Bible if we did want to pick an appropriate passage?
If you wanted to restate the Gospel message of peace you might choose the Sermon on the Mount with its promise that peacemakers will be blessed or an account of how Jesus forgave those who crucified him. Maybe couple that with the vision of the prophets who said that one day swords would be turned into ploughshares.
Or you could examine Jesus’ ministry to soldiers and retell the story of when he cured the servant of the centurion and pair that with any of the stories of warriors in the Old Testament; David maybe, or Joshua.
But today we are left to make sense of an exchange between Jesus and the Sadducees, who are trying to catch Jesus out in a public debate. How can this be relevant to Remembrance Sunday?
It seems to me that the bedrock of truth about Remembrance Sunday is this. For those of us who have lost a loved one or seen a loved one suffer terribly because of armed conflict and for those of us who have witnessed the death and suffering of comrades in arms, there is a pain and a grief that cannot be doubted and should not be challenged. And many of us today have received sacred memories of this pain and grief which we continue to hold and respect on behalf of those who have gone before us.
And maybe we can add to that the anguish we feel when we consider the suffering that people underwent before they died or were wounded and the fear that they felt. And on top of that we must acknowledge the anguish we feel and the guilt that we feel because this fear and suffering is inflicted on humanity by humanity itself. We have done this to ourselves. That is the horrible truth of war and it is a disorienting truth which we must acknowledge before the God of love who created us for things entirely different to war.
If God loves us and loves us for ever, how can there be wars? If there are wars, how can we also be reconciled with each other and with God in all eternity?
And that is more or less the question that the Sadducees asked Jesus. They argued that if a woman has seven husbands they can’t all be her husband when they are resurrected after death. There is no practical way for God to love them all equally so the promise of eternal life must be an empty promise.
Jesus pretty much says that they are just being silly. They are applying human thinking to the action of God. Jesus says that the children of the resurrection are like angels and are the children of God and as such have no need to marry. To God, all these people are alive.
The Sadducees may just as well have asked how men who put on a uniform and killed other people in war, how can these men be reconciled with God after the resurrection? And for that matter, how can men who fought each other on different sides in war, killing each other, killing innocent people, how can they be reconciled with each other in some resurrected state?
And I think Jesus would give pretty much the same answer he gave in our Gospel reading. The children of the resurrection are like angels and are the children of God and as such are forgiven and loved no matter what they have done. They can be reconciled with God and with each other no matter what has happened. To God, all these people are alive.
You may recognise these words from Paul’s letter to the Romans:
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Our national act of remembrance struggles to strike the right balance at times. It suffers from the fundamental weakness that it remains stubbornly a national act of remembrance. People from other countries who have died in war are only included in the national act of remembrance if they died fighting for the British Empire.
But this morning, here, in this place, our act of remembrance can be better than that because it forms part of a celebration of the Eucharist, which is a remembrance of the death Jesus died for the sins of the whole world.
So, when we come to our prayers, we can remember before God, those who have died in wars who came from this place and those whose sacred memories have been entrusted to us. We can remember the people they killed. We can remember the people who killed them. We can remember the people dying in wars today; wars which we have failed to prevent; wars which, it may be said, we are sometimes indirectly profiting from.
We can recall that none of the awful things that we have done to ourselves is able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. We can recall the words of Jesus himself who said that the children of the resurrection are like angels and are the children of God. They have no need to fight any more. To God, all these people; all of them; are alive. We pray for them all. And for ourselves.
Amen.