Ordinary 32 Year C
Sunday 9 November 2025 | The Rev’d Clare Barrie
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O God our Strength and our Redeemer.
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One of the things I’m sometimes asked to do as a priest is to go and say prayers of commendation with someone whose death is imminent – sometimes at home, or in a rest home, or in hospital or a hospice. Most often my experience of these prayers before death is that the dying person is not very aware – by then – of what’s happening around them. But I always pray anyway because we’re connected to this world by all our senses and some say that our hearing is one of the last to go.
Very occasionally though, someone is still quite conscious and lucid almost to the end. I have a strong memory of one woman in Auckland Hospital a few years ago who though weak, sleepy and being helped by an oxygen mask, was very aware of who I was and what I was saying to her. I put on my stole, and read for her these words from our prayerbook – these are traditional words used in our prayers before death, and again at a funeral, called the Commendation.
“Go forth Mary, on your journey from this world,
in the love of God the Father who created you,
in the mercy of Jesus the Redeemer who suffered for you,
in the power of the Holy Spirit who keeps you in life eternal.
May you dwell this day in peace,
and rest in the presence of God. Amen”
And she looked me in the eye and nodded, and held my hand tight. And a little over 48 hours later, she did journey from this world.
These are the acute life and death experiences that bring us face to face with what we know of God, and of Christ’s promises about abundant life and the resurrection. And personally, such moments don’t leave me feeling anxious about belief. Instead, they reach into my gut, my identity, my ways of being and living. Because that’s where Christ’s life and grace is at work in me, in all of us.
In today’s gospel Jesus is confronted by a group of Sadducees. By now in Luke’s gospel, Jesus is already in Jerusalem and there is a constantly building sense of tension and increasingly open confrontation with religious leadership groups. The Sadducees were a very conservative group, and an intellectual, wealthy elite. They based their faith on the Torah alone – the first five books of our Old Testament, and unlike many Jewish groups of their time, they didn’t believe in any sense of resurrection, holding that there was no mention of it in the Torah. For them, God’s justice is therefore limited to this world and this existance. Theologically, Luke is concerned to show us a Jesus who – like most Jews of his time – did hope for the resurrection and for God’s justice, therefore, to extend beyond this world. In a present time of oppression and suffering, this gave them – and gives us – hope for the future.
The Sadducees set a rhetorical trap for Jesus, a mocking, sneering, clever question that tries to expose his teaching about resurrection as an absurdity. They outline a scenario of moral chaos, based on Moses’ teaching of the practise of levirate marriage, where seven brothers marry their brother’s widow, one after another, as each brother dies. In Moses’ time, in a patriarchal culture, it was a way of protecting women. ‘So tell us, Jesus, to which of the brothers will this hapless woman be married once they all reach your wonderful afterlife?’ And they sit back, satisfied that the rustic rabbi from Nazareth will be flummoxed.
Jesus responds by teaching the Sadducees what Moses meant and interpreting their own Scriptures for them; ‘Moses wrote for us’ they had said – so he takes hold of their tradition and says, ‘Moses himself showed…’ His argument hinges on Exodus 3:6, when God spoke to Moses from the burning bush in the present tense: ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’
Crucially, in Jesus’ interpretation, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are not parts of an ancient heritage but citizens of a new age characterised by the resurrection from the dead. God does not say, ‘Once upon a time long ago, I used to be the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, but now they are dead and gone though I remember them with great fondness…’ No – Jesus insists to the Sadducees – God speaks in the present tense. God was, is, and continues to be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Jesus concludes – to God, all of them are alive. And when no one dies anymore, there will be no need for the kind of protection that levirate marriage offers. The Sadducees are silenced.
Our God is not of the dead, but of the living; for to him, all of them are alive.
Jesus’ decisive point is that death is the end of many things, but it is not the end of everything. Our death is not the end of God – and God’s love for us, God’s knowing of us, continue on beyond this life and this world.
As one commentator puts it, ‘This God does not release God’s creatures. With great compassion, God puts them in God’s heart, and they will not ever be excluded from it. We humans are not eternal, but God’s love for us is eternal….As they were, so they are now in God.
We do not know – we cannot know – what resurrection life will be like after death. It’s clear from what Jesus said that existence will be radically different, unbound from all the things that bind and shape us in this world – our fears, our social structures and expectations, our broken desires and sense of incompleteness and struggle. But there will be some continuity with our present identity – in some way, we will become most fully the person God is already imagining us to be now.
And – as one of my American friends used to say – here’s the thing.
That journey ‘from this world’ that I pray for in the words of Commendation that are spoken to a dying person, and again at their funeral… is the journey we are all already on. It is a journey not towards death but towards a fuller life. And that life doesn’t start at death but now, here, every day. We are each held in God’s heart now as we will be always; we are daily invited to become more fully – little by little – the person God is already imagining us to be.
In the lovely phrase of Wendell Berry, living into being that person is to ‘practice resurrection’ – the idea that resurrection life is a way of living and being, not some dry unknown future. Practicing resurrection is the daily shaping of our living and being towards grace, towards Christ, who is always coming towards us with love and joy.
This reminds me of a favourite poem by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manly Hopkins that I won’t read in full because I could not do it justice – but in a torrent of words and images he describes the incredible wild and rich life that is in nature and how desolate it is when death comes – but then ‘Enough! the Resurrection, a heart’s-clarion’ Hopkins writes. He goes on, ’Across my foundering deck shone a beacon, an eternal beam…’
“…In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
this Jack, joke, poor potsherd,
patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.”
Hopkins captures something of the astonishment of realising what he is now – what all of us are now – today – in God’s eyes, in God’s heart: immortal diamond. Not one day when we get it all right; not when we die – but here, now, we are all at once what Christ is – immortal diamond.
And the immense invitation that God extends to us all is to respond, daily, in each moment even – to choose again and again to live in response to God’s love rather than being bound by our own shame and limitations. It is to bring my whole and deepest self, again and again, into God’s light, trusting that I am held, now and always, in God’s heart – not as I think I ought to be, but as I am – immortal diamond.
Let me then offer the prayer of Commendation for all of us, today, as we journey towards the fullnes of life in God.
“Go forth, on your journey in this world,
in the love of God who created you,
in the mercy of Jesus the Redeemer who suffered for you,
in the power of the Holy Spirit who keeps you in life eternal.
May you dwell this day in peace,
and live in the presence of God.
Amen.”