The Island Parson

Sunday, December 4, 2016     Second Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 5.1–7
2 Peter 3.11–18
Luke 7.28–35
The text of the readings follows after the comments.

The Red Vineyard at Arles, by Vincent van Gogh, 1888

Why do people do the wrong thing? Why is there evil?

I’ve been mulling this over for many years. As some of you know, I’ve been working on a PhD through Heythrop College, the Jesuit college in the University of London. The topic of the dissertation is the theological legacy of the Indian Residential Schools (“IRS”) which were operated by the churches in Canada on behalf of the federal government from the 1880s until the 1970s. It was described in the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report as “cultural genocide” and I would argue that the modifying term “cultural” can be left off, given the number of deaths and the fact that the  IRS was set up to assimilate the indigenous population (also, see the definition in the Genocide Convention). And yet the churches were enthusiastic supporters of the schools despite the evidence of their detrimental effect on the students and families. Most of the staff (with the exception of a small number of sexual predators) were what we would have called “good people”. In the dissertation I critique the theologies that informed the mission that justified the IRS, and then examine a type of theology that might not lead us down such paths again in other circumstances.

The study of evil in a theological or philosophical context is called a “theodicy”. One of the authors I am using as a critical tool, the French and Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), claims that after the Holocaust it is no longer possible to construct a theodicy on a rational basis. Christians have typically tended to not go so far.

Some would follow St Augustine in seeing evil as simply the privation of good. The evil we see in the world is real, but it is the result of ignorance or error. Everything that is created by God is created with the possibility of being good. This is, of course, a pre-modern perspective, and assumes that one sees the Creator as the Good to which all creation naturally aspires. A modern perspective suspends the question of belief in God and sees good and evil as a matter of human choice, and sometimes the difference between the two is impossible to discern. Goods such as family, nation, pleasure, security, the environment, privacy, other people, and so forth jostle for our attention, along with fears about our economic stability, threats to our lives, corruption, physical and sexual violence, bigotry, and competition. As the philosopher Isaiah Berlin pointed out these values (or rights) are incommensurable – they will conflict with each other and they are only resolved (if at all) after discussion and compromise. The good becomes more relative, as does evil.

An old way of understanding evil in the world is to see it as a force, driven by spirits or the devil. This sees the world as a battlefield of binary forces, good and evil. Some of this is present in the Scriptures, but it is in tension with another understanding, which is that God is in charge of everything. Isaiah 45.6-7 in the translation of the  Authorised Version/King James Version says: “I am the Lord, and there is none else.I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” Thus when bad things happen to people some of them blame God, and question God’s world and the justice of it – and on the basis of this passage, they do seem to know who is responsible. Today’s reading from Isaiah describes a God who is punishing Israel and Judah for producing bloodshed instead of justice and righteousness. And the parable of God as the owner and builder of the vineyard, would suggest that God has every right to do what God wants with his own property. This is the theology of Isaiah – that God will chasten Israel and Judah in the hope that they will repent and return, that they will be purified and become holy (as yesterday’s reading suggests).

In contrast to this we have the Book of Job, which might be described as a dissenting  opinion. Job experiences great woes for no discernible (to him) reason at all, and four friends come to him to try and convince him that there is a good rational reason. He rejects them all, and demands his day in the court of the Lord. Then, miraculously, God does appear from the whirlwind – but does not justify the divine to humanity, but simply argues that the question is unanswerable.

My reading of the new testament is that it doesn’t really answer the question of evil either. Yes, God is just and will bring justice, but the cause of evil itself is not all clear (despite later theologians attempts to blame Adam and Eve). As the author of 2 Peter suggests, it is due to ignorance, error, and instability. Knowledge, truth, and stability is not just a matter of having the right opinions and propositions, it is more the relation of the faithful with God in Christ, as manifested in prayer and love. In the Gospel reading for today the Pharisees and Scribes, despite their great learning, are in error because they cannot see the justice of God at work in either John the Baptist and Jesus as the Son of Man. Whereas in love Jesus associates with tax collectors and sinners, their systems of knowledge and thought holds them aloof and condemning – cut off from opportunities of being with people, instead of their own self-satisfaction.

From my reading of history most people who do evil do not think they are doing bad things, but rather they think that, on balance, they are doing good things (although that good may be limited to themselves or to a group). They still aim at the good, although they miss the mark. I do not know the origin of evil in this world – I read Genesis 2-3 as a description of the way things are, broken and fallen, and not so much as an origin story. The Good News of Jesus Christ does not explain everything, but what it does tell me is that God is with us, in the flesh in Jesus suffering alongside humanity, and that God is in me by the Holy Spirit, and that however much I fall short of what it is that I have been created to be, God forgives me and seeks to transform me ever more into the divine likeness. So I worry less about why there is evil, and more about following Jesus, seeking to bring relief and do good.

Isaiah 5.1–7
Let me sing for my beloved
my love-song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watch-tower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;
he expected it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.

And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem
and people of Judah,
judge between me
and my vineyard.
What more was there to do for my vineyard
that I have not done in it?
When I expected it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes.

And now I will tell you
what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the people of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
he expected justice,
but saw bloodshed;
righteousness,
but heard a cry!

2 Peter 3.11–18
Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation. So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given to him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures. You therefore, beloved, since you are forewarned, beware that you are not carried away with the error of the lawless and lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.

Luke 7.28–35
[Jesus said] “I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.”(And all the people who heard this, including the tax-collectors, acknowledged the justice of God, because they had been baptized with John’s baptism. But by refusing to be baptized by him, the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected God’s purpose for themselves.)
“To what then will I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the market-place and calling to one another,
We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not weep.
For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, “He has a demon”; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” Nevertheless, wisdom is vindicated by all her children.”

December 3, 2016     Saturday after the First Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 4.2–6
1 Thessalonians 4.13–18
Luke 21.5–19
The text of the readings follows after the comments.

A naive understanding of prophecy assumes that it is always about the reader’s future, and that it is always fulfilled. In fact prophecy is sometimes fulfilled completely, sometimes not at all, sometimes partially, and sometimes in ways never expected. Prophecy is also recycled, so that something that referred to one situation is used to interpret another. Prophecy is fecund and can be read repeatedly in new contexts for new purposes. Not all these readings are legitimate, of course, and part of any reader’s challenge is to determine the criteria that make for a good reading.

The passage from Luke is a fulfilled prophecy. Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and by the time the author of the gospel put stylus to papyrus the Temple had been indeed destroyed in 70 AD, following the failed Jewish rebellion of 66-70 AD. Luke probably had the Gospel according to Mark in front of him, but he significantly rewrote Mark 13 in light of what had happened. Jesus speaks about other things that will happen – wars, insurrections, false messiahs – and none of these are signs that “the end” is near. Likewise famines and dread portents will happen around this time, “but the end will not follow immediately.” Persecution of Christians will also come, and Jesus encourages his followers to rely on him to provide words of defence. What is important to understand here is that the author is describing things that had already taken place or were taking place now. The end days were already here, and had been since the coming of Jesus; the culmination of these days was delayed, however.

This delay created a problem for the Thessalonians. This letter, written perhaps written as early as 41 AD (so little more than a decade after Jesus’ death and resurrection) is very much written in the context of the expectation of an imminent return of Jesus as the Son of Man in glory to judge “the quick and the dead”. In today’s reading Paul describes the return of Jesus and includes himself as “we who are alive, who are left,” who “will be caught up in the clouds together . . . to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord for ever.” But what about those followers of Jesus who had already died? Paul announces that they will be raised right at the time of the coming of Jesus; it sounds as though this is not the general resurrection of all humanity, but an anticipatory resurrection of those who died in Christ, and get a free pass on the judgment of the world. Clearly, this is a passage of unfulfilled passage, and we here we are twenty centuries later, still waiting. Paul in his later letters seems to have acknowledged that he would die before the second coming, and his themes in the letters are less eschatological.

The passage from Isaiah is both fulfilled and unfulfilled. I suspect this does go back to the 8th century BC, and the prophet is speaking of a time after great disaster comes to Judea and Jerusalem. A faithful remnant is left in Zion, and just as God dwelt among the people in the wilderness with “a cloud by day and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night” so it will be then. Well, the fulfilled part is that Jerusalem and Judea was conquered and the Temple destroyed in 586 BC, and it was probably this that the editors of Isaiah thought of when the book received its final form. Certainly Second Isaiah picks up on the hope of redemption from this earlier passage, and looks to the return of the Jews from exile in Babylon as the fulfillment. But it never quite happened. The Jewish priests and upper classes who had been exiled did more or less return, but they remained under foreign sovereignty, and were slow to rebuild the city and the Temple. Third Isaiah (chapters 56-66) seem to have been written in that time of disappointment, and looks to a more radical intervention of God.

Later Jewish authors, in the centuries immediately before Jesus, began to believe that this intervention would be in the form of the coming of the Son of Man, and that the dead would be raised and that they with the living would be judged, and that God would transform the world and invite the righteous to live and feast in a New Jerusalem. The resurrection was fundamentally an issue of God’s justice. A simple understanding of God’s justice was that in this world good things happen to good people, and that bad things happen to bad people. However, this understanding started to fray when  the righteous often suffered oppression and death at the hands of the unrepentant heathen. Resurrection corrected that imbalance. The resurrection of the dead followed by judgment was the time when God would make things right, and those who had been arrogant would be pulled down and the humble would be exalted, and the hungry fed and the rich sent empty away (as the Magnificat puts it). The resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday inaugurates God’s recreation of the cosmos, and the making things right.

Every day when I recite the Apostle’s Creed I say that I believe that Jesus “will come again
to judge the living and the dead” and that “I believe in . . . the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.” For me this means that I live knowing that I am in the end days, and that I seek re-creation and justice, and rely on God’s Spirit to strengthen me when times are hard. I try to live as though I am already in the New Jerusalem with the presence of God.

Isaiah 4.2–6
On that day the branch of the Lord shall be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land shall be the pride and glory of the survivors of Israel. Whoever is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy, everyone who has been recorded for life in Jerusalem, once the Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgement and by a spirit of burning. Then the Lord will create over the whole site of Mount Zion and over its places of assembly a cloud by day and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night. Indeed, over all the glory there will be a canopy. It will serve as a pavilion, a shade by day from the heat, and a refuge and a shelter from the storm and rain.

1 Thessalonians 4.13–18
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord for ever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.

Luke 21.5–19
           When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’
They asked him, ‘Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?’ And he said, ‘Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, “I am he!” and, “The time is near!” Do not go after them.
‘When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.’ Then he said to them, ‘Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.
‘But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare your defence in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.

December 2, 2016     Friday after the First Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 3.8–15
1 Th 4.1–12
Lk 20.41—21.4
The text of the readings follows after the comments.

A Sketch of The Trinity, by William Blake

The thing about a lectionary is that it takes you places you don’t expect. I did not intend to spend yesterday musing about celibacy as a subversive act of faith challenging the role of marriage in a patriarchal society, but that’s where the readings seemed to lead me. And today is similar. In the second reading we find, “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from fornication; that each one of you knows how to control your own body in holiness and honour, not with lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one wrongs or exploits a brother or sister in this matter . . .”. So, we’re back to sex, again. So why is Paul saying this?

When I was studying Divinity in 1987 I saw a course in the calendar listed with the name: “Ante-Nicene Anthropology, Part Two” It was such a bizarre title I had to take it. It was taught by Father John Egan SJ at Regis College, the Jesuit college within the Toronto School of Theology. The subject matter was really the theological writings of Origin of Alexandria,  who worked in the early party of the Third Century. One of the things that became very clear in this course is that how we think about God has implications for how we think about human beings, and vice versa. Genesis 1.27 reads: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” As a result of this theologians have reflected over thirty centuries about what this might mean. Some saw it in rationality, others in complementary masculine and feminine aspects, some in creativity, and still others in the ability to control the environment. So our anthropology says something about how we understand God, and our theology always has implications for how we understand humanity. Origin of Alexandria had some rather interesting ideas – the pre-existence of souls, and a double creation of the invisible and visible, for example – and these were all derived from his Neoplatonic conception of God.

Human beings are inherently sexual creatures. We don’t see God as sexual, but what is common to both human sexuality and the human relation to God is desire. Sarah Coakley in her recent book God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity  makes this point, and according to Tina Beattie in a recent review, “Coakley turns Freud “on his head” by insisting that God rather than sex is the source and focus of erotic desire: “Instead of ‘God’ language ‘really’ being about sex, sex is really about God” (316). If genital sex occupies a less central role in this than it does in our sex-obsessed culture, the eroticism associated with sexual desire is inseparable from our experience of desire for God.”

This puts today’s passage from 1 Thessalonians into perspective. Paul knows that in the past the recipients of his letters have been pagans and worshiped idols, and either knows or assumes that they followed a sexual morality at odds with what he knew of in Judaism. To his mind this kind of lustful passion is out of control, and I find it interesting that he wants his readers to avoid wronging or exploiting another member of the church. What that suggests is that he is fully aware of both the power and the danger that comes with sexual relations, and that there is always the possibility of harming another person through sexual assault or exploitation. In the rigidly hierarchical society of the ancient Roman Empire a woman or a slave had no rights over their bodies, and their “superiors” regularly used them for their own sexual gratification. Paul, as imperfect an egalitarian as he was, had a more non-hierarchical understanding of relations, in which in Christ there was no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. In Paul’s view uncontrolled lust that led to exploitation came from worshiping idols, whereas a focus on the true God leads to the desire to be holy and honourable, with the expectation that one will not assault another person or sexually exploit them. The admonition against fornication is not prudery as such, it is about not harming another person, and about rightly using desire.

Let’s see where tomorrow takes us, eh? God be with you.

Isaiah 3.8–15
For Jerusalem has stumbled
and Judah has fallen,
because their speech and their deeds are against the Lord,
defying his glorious presence.

The look on their faces bears witness against them;
they proclaim their sin like Sodom,
they do not hide it.
Woe to them!
For they have brought evil on themselves.
Tell the innocent how fortunate they are,
for they shall eat the fruit of their labours.
Woe to the guilty! How unfortunate they are,
for what their hands have done shall be done to them.
My people—children are their oppressors,
and women rule over them.
O my people, your leaders mislead you,
and confuse the course of your paths.

The Lord rises to argue his case;
he stands to judge the peoples.
The Lord enters into judgment
with the elders and princes of his people:
It is you who have devoured the vineyard;
the spoil of the poor is in your houses.
What do you mean by crushing my people,
by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord God of hosts.

1 Thessalonians 4.1–12
Finally, brothers and sisters, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus that, as you learned from us how you ought to live and to please God (as, in fact, you are doing), you should do so more and more. For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from fornication; that each one of you knows how to control your own body in holiness and honour, not with lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one wrongs or exploits a brother or sister in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, just as we have already told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. For God did not call us to impurity but in holiness. Therefore whoever rejects this rejects not human authority but God, who also gives his Holy Spirit to you.
Now concerning love of the brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anyone write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another; and indeed you do love all the brothers and sisters throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, beloved, to do so more and more, to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we directed you, so that you may behave properly towards outsiders and be dependent on no one.

Luke 20.41—21.4
Then he said to them, ‘How can they say that the Messiah is David’s son? For David himself says in the book of Psalms,
“The Lord said to my Lord,
‘Sit at my right hand,
until I make your enemies your footstool.’ ”
David thus calls him Lord; so how can he be his son?’
In the hearing of all the people he said to the disciples, ‘Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and love to be greeted with respect in the market-places, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honour at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.’
He looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. He said, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.’

Thursday December 1, 2016     Thursday after the First Sunday of Advent
Is 2.12–22
1 Th 3.1–13
Lk 20.27–40The text of the readings follows after the comments.

The passage from Isaiah inveighs against the arrogant who follow idols. The people living in Judea and Israel in the 8th century BC worshiped YHWH (the name of God in the Hebrew Bible usually replaced in English translations with “the LORD”), but they also worshiped other gods, most notably Asherah, who many considered to be the consort of YHWH. Asherah seems to have been closely connected to trees and in imitation of the trees, posts in temples. David and Solomon sought to centralize the worship of YHWH in the Temple at Jerusalem, but this was resisted by the northern kingdom of Israel that broke away from Judea after Solomon; apart from Israel’s official temples in Shechem it appears that the ordinary people continued to worship idols in groves of trees and on high hills. I think this is why Isaiah challenges the cedars of Lebanon and the oaks of Bashan, and the high mountains and the lofty hills, because they represent to him idolatry and a turning away from YHWH, the one God, who cannot be represented by an idol. I love the idea that the idols will be tossed to the moles and the bats.

We have idols today as well, only they are not Asherah. Our idols are political, economic, and sociological. And just as YHWH and Asherah were combined and many saw no problem with that, so today people conform our religion to these dominant systems of thought. However, if one takes it apart we see that it is idolatry. The arrogant pride we have in the our nations can be idolatry. The material wealth we have accumulated can be idolatry. Our physical appearance, r our standing in the world can be idolatry. What is not idolatry is our relationship with God, without which we will find it hard to see creation in the right way. If we are idolatrous, we will privilege natural resource development over the long-standing grievances of indigenous people. If we are idolatrous we will emphasise security in immigration to the reduction or elimination of offering help to refugees.

In the reading from Luke Jesus is teaching in the Temple, and a series of people seek to confront Jesus and trap him into saying something that would justify action against him. In today’s reading the Sadducees  challenge him on a point about the logic of the resurrection. Among the Jewish people in general (and the surrounding Hellenistic and Roman cultures) marriage was a central value. The purpose of sexuality in First Century Palestine was not self-expression or even necessarily joy, but the making of alliances through marriage and the propagation of those relationships through the procreation of children. Marriage was such a central fact of society and such an important value that the Sadducees could not imagine that it would not persist into the resurrection (even though they did not believe in it). So they posed their question to Jesus, and you can see the response. Basically, marriage, which seems to be such a cosmically ordained factor in human existence, just will not be of any important in the the new creation.

Marriage, which is “an honorable estate”, can become an idol as well as anything. The kind of culture Jesus was in so valued marriage that it overwhelmed many other aspects of human relationships. We might not think of this as having much to do with “sexuality” as we understand it in the 21st century, but it does – who we are as sexual and gendered beings are determined by these kinds of relationships. Marriage as understood in the 1st century was not really about love, or sexual expression, human fulfillment, or care and affection, it was about the extended family. As a result some of these other aspects were repressed.

It’s in this light that we can see the emergence of celibacy as a virtue. Celibacy was a subversive challenge to the idolatry of marriage, the belief that nothing was more important than making a good marriage and having lots of children. It created a space in which other aspects of the individual could flourish in ways that they might not in a traditional marriage. It called into question the presumptions of patriarchy and clan association.

Such was the case in the early centuries of the faith. What are the idolatries of today that need to be challenged?

Isaiah 2.12–22
For the Lord of hosts has a day
against all that is proud and lofty,
against all that is lifted up and high;
against all the cedars of Lebanon,
lofty and lifted up;
and against all the oaks of Bashan;
against all the high mountains,
and against all the lofty hills;
against every high tower,
and against every fortified wall;
against all the ships of Tarshish,
and against all the beautiful craft.
The haughtiness of people shall be humbled,
and the pride of everyone shall be brought low;
and the Lord alone will be exalted on that day.
The idols shall utterly pass away.
Enter the caves of the rocks
and the holes of the ground,
from the terror of the Lord,
and from the glory of his majesty,
when he rises to terrify the earth.
On that day people will throw away
to the moles and to the bats
their idols of silver and their idols of gold,
which they made for themselves to worship,
to enter the caverns of the rocks
and the clefts in the crags,
from the terror of the Lord,
and from the glory of his majesty,
when he rises to terrify the earth.
Turn away from mortals,
who have only breath in their nostrils,
for of what account are they?

1 Thessalonians 3.1–13
            Therefore when we could bear it no longer, we decided to be left alone in Athens; and we sent Timothy, our brother and co-worker for God in proclaiming the gospel of Christ, to strengthen and encourage you for the sake of your faith, so that no one would be shaken by these persecutions. Indeed, you yourselves know that this is what we are destined for. In fact, when we were with you, we told you beforehand that we were to suffer persecution; so it turned out, as you know. For this reason, when I could bear it no longer, I sent to find out about your faith; I was afraid that somehow the tempter had tempted you and that our labour had been in vain.
But Timothy has just now come to us from you, and has brought us the good news of your faith and love. He has told us also that you always remember us kindly and long to see us—just as we long to see you. For this reason, brothers and sisters, during all our distress and persecution we have been encouraged about you through your faith. For we now live, if you continue to stand firm in the Lord. How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you? Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith.
Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you. And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.

Luke 20.27–40
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.’ Then some of the scribes answered, ‘Teacher, you have spoken well.’ For they no longer dared to ask him another question.