Jesus the Thief

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

11.00 Sunday 1st Dec 2013

Isaiah 2:1-5  The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.  ² In days to come the mountain of the LORD's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.  ³ Many peoples shall come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths." For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.  ⁴ He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.  ⁵ O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD!

Romans 13:11-14  Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers;  ¹² the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light;  ¹³ let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.  ¹⁴ Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Matthew 24:36-44  "But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.  ³⁷ For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.  ³⁸ For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark,  ³⁹ and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man.  ⁴⁰ Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left.  ⁴¹ Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.  ⁴² Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.  ⁴³ But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.  ⁴⁴ Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

I wonder what image, what picture,

            comes to mind when we think of Jesus?

Perhaps, as we approach Christmas,

            we might visualise Jesus the tiny baby,

            born into a stable environment somewhere near Bethlehem.

Or maybe, to be perhaps more faithful to the season of advent,

                        if not to scripture itself,

            we might conceive of Jesus as the unborn child,

            carried by his mother on a donkey, led by Joseph.

Or perhaps we might imagine Jesus the teenager,

            precociously engaging with the scribes in the temple,

Or Jesus the adult,

            eating meals with friends,

            annoying the religious authorities,

            and bringing healing and wholeness to those he encountered.

Or perhaps we might think of Jesus on the cross,

            or the Jesus of the empty tomb…

Or maybe we think of Jesus in more metaphorical terms:

            Jesus the good shepherd,

            Jesus the light of the world,

            Jesus the messiah,

            Jesus the bread of life

            Jesus the living water

            Jesus the gateway to eternal life

However, there’s one image that I’m going to guess won’t readily come to mind,

            and yet it’s one with strong scriptural precedent,

and that’s the image of Jesus as a thief in the night.

We’ve already met Jesus the thief in our passage for this morning,

            he’s there in verses 43-44 of our gospel reading,

                        but we can also find him in a number of other places

                        elsewhere in the New Testament:

In 1 Thessalonians 5:2, Paul says that

            ‘the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night’,

something which he reinforces a couple of verses later,

            reminding his readers in Thessalonica that

                        because they live in the light, and not in darkness,

            they will not be surprised when the day of the Lord comes ‘like a thief’ (v.4).

2 Peter 3:10  makes a similar point, taking the language of Paul

            and re-appropriating it for a later generation.

He says: ‘the day of the Lord will come like a thief,

            and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise,

                        and the elements will be dissolved with fire,

            and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.’

And in a similar apocalyptic vein,

            there are a couple of references to Jesus the thief in the book of Revelation.

Firstly in Revelation 3:3, the church in Sardis are told to,

            ‘Remember then what you received and heard;

                        obey it, and repent.

            If you do not wake up, I will come like a thief,

                        and you will not know at what hour I will come to you.’

And then secondly in Revelation 16:15 ,

            the voice of Jesus proclaims

            ‘See, I am coming like a thief!

                        Blessed is the one who stays awake and is clothed,

                        not going about naked and exposed to shame.’

This idea of Jesus breaking and entering a house

            in order to plunder the property within

also finds a parallel in Mark’s gospel,

            where Jesus gives his parable of the strong man:

Mark 3:27 reads, ‘no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his property

            without first tying up the strong man;

            then indeed the house can be plundered.’

In this short parable, Jesus makes his subversive intentions clear,

            likening his mission to that of the thief.

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ ministry can be understood in terms of

            his breaking into Satan’s house, tying him up,

            and releasing that which has been held captive.

Matthew, in our passage for this morning, presents the same idea but slightly differently,

            offering us a different perspective on Jesus the thief,

            emphasising the unexpectedness of the manner of his coming.

One of the interesting things about many of these references to Jesus the thief,

            and it’s something we find in our passages for today as well,

is the way in which they interplay

            between the language of light and darkness, of daytime and night.

Jesus the thief comes unexpectedly in the night,

            he comes suddenly into the darkness of a slumbering world;

but when he comes, what he brings with him

            is light and life, because he brings the ‘day of the Lord’.

The darkness of the night gives way to the light of ‘the day’

This is a strange kind of thief, isn’t it?

            Most thieves operate in darkness, and like to keep it that way.

            They come in darkness, steal what they have come to acquire,

                        and then leave under the cover of darkness.

But although Jesus the thief comes in darkness,

            what he brings is not more darkness,

                        but the growing brightness

                        of the dawning of the ‘day of the Lord’.

The unexpected hour of the arrival of ‘the day’,

            reveals the deeds of the night for what they are,

            bringing into view that which might otherwise remain shrouded in darkness.

As Paul says in our reading from his letter to the Romans:

            the time has come to ‘lay aside the works of darkness,

                        and to put on the armour of light,’

            to ‘live honourably as in “the day”’

Now, I’ve heard this language of the ‘thief in the night’

            used very unhelpfully over the years,

and I want this morning to offer us a different,

            and I believe better, way of engaging with it.

The application of this image of Jesus, as the thief in the night,

            certainly shouldn’t be, ‘Look busy, Jesus is coming’.

Neither should it primarily be about personal morality,

            and the risk of getting caught out doing something naughty.

In fact, I would suggest that any attempt to use the promise of Jesus’ coming,

            as a threat to enforce ethics by fear,

            is a long way from the good news of the gospel of Christ.

And neither is this passage about what has often been called ‘the rapture’

            which is a largely unscriptural and relatively recent doctrine

            that teaches Christians to expect that

                        at a sudden and unexpected future advent of Jesus,

                        they will be swept off the earth to glory in the clouds,

            whilst the world quite literally goes to hell beneath them.

Rather, this passage is about the incarnation.

            It is about the coming of Jesus into the world as a human being.

Not as a king, but as a refugee,

            not as a powerful ruler, but as a dissident revolutionary,

            not as the son of a king, but as the child of a young and unmarried girl.

Jesus, the light of the world,

            came into the darkness, not as anyone expected him to come,

            but in the most surprising way imaginable:

He came as a thief in the night,

            under the cover of darkness,

            to bring the new and unexpected light of the day of the Lord.

He came to plunder the house of the strong man,

            and to liberate those held captive.

He came to steal the world back from the forces of Satan,

            and to break the power of the owner of the house.

And the earth has been enslaved for far too long;

            the forces of the satanic empire have held power over the peoples of the earth

                        for so long that it has become normality,

            and too easily we have grown complacent to the horror of it.

The image of two men in a field,

            with one taken and one left,

or two women at the mill,

            with one taken and one left,

is a stark metaphor for the terror that the satanic empire

            wreaks across the face of the earth.

Tom Wright helpfully reminds us of the force of this image.

He says:

This doesn’t mean (as some have suggested)

            that one person will be ‘taken’ away by God

                        in some kind of supernatural salvation,

            while the other is ‘left’ to face destruction.

If anything, it’s the opposite:

            when invading forces sweep through a town or village,

                        they will ‘take’ some off to their deaths,

                        and ‘leave’ others untouched.[1]

The empire flexes its muscles, and someone dies, while someone else lives.

            And we say to ourselves that ‘it’s the way of the world’.

We justify our complicity in such satanic systems,

                        as long as it’s me and mine that live.

We comfort ourselves with the mantra that the death of others, elsewhere,

            to war, starvation, or oppression,

                        is regrettable, but unavoidable.

The force of Jesus’ image of two workers side by side,

            with one taken to their death, and one escaping with their life,

is that all humans are equal, that all workers are alike.

Whether a person is working at the top of the pile in the affluent west,

            or at the bottom of the pile

            in the dangerous and impoverished developing world,

                        we are all equal in the sight of God.

The shock of one being taken and one left

            vividly highlights the capricious nature of those principalities and powers

                        that control life and death on a global scale.

Whether it’s the Roman empire of the first century,

            or the empire of global capital of our own century,

Jesus invites us to realise

            that when someone dies in the collapse of a poorly built factory in Bangladesh,

            or at the bottom of a sub-standard coltan mine in the Congo,

they are in actual fact the worker standing alongside us

            as we wear our affordable clothes,

            using our smartphones to update our status.

The other has been taken, and we remain.

This is the darkness of the satanic empire,

            and it is into this darkness

                        that the light of the world comes,

            like a thief in the night,

                        to steal the world back from the forces of empire.

This is how Jesus came,

            it is how he still comes,

                        and it is how he will come again, and again, and again.

The light of the world comes as he has always come,

            as a thief in the night:

            unexpectedly, irrevocably, subversively.

Slipping in under the radar,

            to steal the world back from those forces that currently hold it hostage.

The strong man’s house is still in darkness,

            the military and economic forces of the empire still tower over the world,

lulling those of us who live here to sleep with the opiate of affluence,

            inviting us to close our eyes to the darkness that is all around us.

The call in the images of Jesus as the thief

            is that we should wake up,

            we should open our eyes,

            we should learn to see the world around us in the light of his dawning day.

We should be ready for the revolution,

            not napping the night away.

We may be the under-cover sleeper-agents of the in-breaking kingdom of God,

            but mustn’t to be caught sleeping with our heads under the covers.

The call is for us to be ready and alert to the light of Christ

                        which shines in unexpected places,

            never thinking we know in advance where Jesus will be found next,

                        but always ready to greet him when he comes,

            ever attentive to the dawning of the day of the Lord.

But this invitation to wake up, to open our eyes,

                        and to learn to see the world differently,

            is an invitation that it’s very easy to ignore.

You see, the world can just seem so normal, can’t it?

            It can be so hard to believe that not everything around us is of equal value,

            it can be so hard to believe that not everything we do is of eternal value.

So here, perhaps, we need to hear the lesson of Noah.

            He could see that the world was going change,

                        his eyes were opened to the darkness that surrounded him,

                                    and he started building accordingly.

But everyone else just went on eating, drinking, and marrying,

            little realizing that they were sleep-walking their way to disaster.

The story of Noah offers a clear parable,

            of just how easy it is to carry on ‘carrying on’,

                        whilst remaining wilfully or blissfully blind

                        to the darkness that is closing in all around us.

But it also offers a message of hope to those who live upon the earth,

            because the promise to Noah, at the end of the story,

            is that God is turning his back forever on the strategy of ‘re-booting’ creation.

Genesis 8:21-22   The LORD said in his heart, "I will never again curse the ground because of humankind… nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.  ²² As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease."

The story of Noah explores and rejects the idea

            that God might one day re-start the earth

                        with a small group of the elect few, lifted above the tumult,

                        to survive and repopulate a re-created earth.

Our future is here, on this earth,

            and we need to wake up to the impact that the empires we create are having

                        on the created order that is ours to tend.

Because God is not, I think, going to give us a ‘get out of jail free’ card

            that re-starts it all for the favoured few on a newly-minted earth Mark II.

It’s no small irony that this passage has been used so extensively

            by those who have argued that we should expect exactly this.

But I think they are wrong.

The point of the parable of Noah is that the coming flood

            is not a flood of destruction,

            but the flood of the in-breaking kingdom of God.

It’s the flood of the dawning day of the Lord,

            it’s the coming of the Son of Man;

whose light shines in the darkness,

            exposing to the light the even darkest corners of the earth.

The encouragement to wake up, to be alert, to live in the light,

            is both an encouragement to build lives

                        that will endure when exposed to the light of Christ,

            and a warning to those whose deeds and priorities and relationships

                        are only sustainable in darkness.

As Jesus said earlier in Matthew’s gospel,

Matthew 7:26-27  Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them

            will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 

The rain fell, and the floods came,

            and the winds blew and beat against that house,

            and it fell-- and great was its fall!

The coming day of the Lord is a flood that exposes

            the very foundations on which our lives and empires have been built,

and it asks us to consider carefully

            the ground on which we’re building.

We might get away with it once,

            we might get away with it twice,

            we might get away with it for years.

But in time the behavior becomes a pattern,

            and the luxury becomes an addiction,

and our priorities slowly re-orientate themselves

            away from a life lived in the light of Christ,

            towards a life lived in darkness.
We displace God revealed in Christ as the ground of our being
            and fill the void with patterns of our own devising.

And all the while we blind ourselves to what is happening,
            closing our eyes to the light of day,

            and slowly we sleep-walk our way to destruction.

Wake up! says Jesus, because the day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night.

            The days of darkness are numbered,

                        and the time has now come to walk in the light of the Lord (Isa 2.5).

‘Keep awake therefore,

            for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming’ (24.42)

In Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urberville’s

            the heroine Tess ponders the day of her death;

and she observes that everyone who has died,

            is always remembered on the anniversary of their death,

and yet they lived their whole life never knowing that date,

            passing over the day of their death as if it were just another day.

‘Keep awake therefore,

            for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming’ (24.42)

No-one expected Bethlehem,

            no-one expected a baby,

            no-one expected Mary, or Joseph, or a stable.

No-one expected the homeless wandering prophet of new life,

            no-one expected the cross,

            no-one expected the resurrection.

But, as Bruce Cockburn so memorably put it,

            ‘redemption rips through the surface of time

                        in the cry of a tiny babe’

So be alert! Keep awake!

Because the son of man comes like a thief in the night,

            to steal the world for good.

---

[1] Matthew for Everyone, Part 2, p.127.

Prayer for the feast of Christ the King

Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven

Through our lives and by our prayers,

your kingdom come.

Great Christ of all love,

            in whose cross all power and authority finds its ultimate end,

we come to pray now for those earthly powers

            which determine and dictate the lives of people.

We lay before you

            those powers which present as our governing authorities.

We pray for those who work in our government and the civil service,

            and for all others at a national and local level

            who hold their delegated power on behalf of us all.

We pray also for those governments around our world

            which have put aside any notion of appropriate representation,

            and whose actions are perpetrated from base motives.

May they see through you and in us a way of being human

            that respects the other, holds authority lightly but responsibly,

            and is ever alert to the temptation to selfish misuse of power.

Grant them eyes to see, ears to hear,

            and the courage to act with compassion and mercy.

Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven

Through our lives and by our prayers,

your kingdom come.

Great Christ of all love,

            in whose cross all power and authority finds its ultimate end,

We lay before you

            those powers which present as military might.

We pray for those in our armed services,

            for soldiers and generals,

            for peacekeepers and tactical forces

            for law-enforcers and legislators of law,

            and for all others whose power relies on the application of force.

We pray also for those armies and militia forces around our world,

            which have put aside any notion of appropriate force,

            and whose actions are perpetrated from base motives.

May they see through you and in us a way of being human

            that respects the other, holds authority lightly but responsibly,

            and is ever alert to the temptation to selfish misuse of power.

Grant them eyes to see, ears to hear,

            and the courage to act with compassion and mercy.

Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven

Through our lives and by our prayers,

your kingdom come.

Great Christ of all love,

            in whose cross all power and authority finds its ultimate end,

We lay before you

            those powers which present as economic might.

We pray for those in our banks and businesses,

            for those who have personal wealth,

            and for those who handle great wealth on behalf of others.

We pray also for those economic forces around our world

            which have put aside any notion of appropriate distribution,

            and whose actions are perpetrated from base motives.

May they see through you and in us a way of being human

            that respects the other, holds authority lightly but responsibly,

            and is ever alert to the temptation to selfish misuse of power.

Grant them eyes to see, ears to hear,

            and the courage to act with compassion and mercy.

Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven

Through our lives and by our prayers,

your kingdom come.

Remember, Remember... Remembrance Sunday Sermon

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, 
Remembrance Sunday 
10th November 2013 11.00am

Luke 20.27-38  Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him  ²⁸ ¶ 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.  ²⁹ Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless;  ³⁰ then the second  ³¹ and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless.  ³² Finally the woman also died.  ³³ In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her."  ³⁴ ¶ Jesus said to them, "Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage;  ³⁵ 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.  ³⁶ Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.  ³⁷ 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.  ³⁸ Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."

Genesis 4.8-10  Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let us go out to the field." And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.  ⁹ Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" He said, "I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?"  ¹⁰ And the LORD said, "What have you done? Listen; your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground!

       

Job 19.23-27  "O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book!  ²⁴ O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever!  ²⁵ For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;  ²⁶ and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God,  ²⁷ whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another.

The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me;   

  That there's some corner of a foreign field 

That is for ever England. There shall be          

  In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;   

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,       

  Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,         

A body of England's breathing English air,     

  Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.        

 

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,        

  A pulse in the eternal mind, no less     

    Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;  

  And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,    

    In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

                        Rupert Brooke. 1887–1915

What will they think of me when I’m gone?

            Who will remember me?

They say ‘life goes on’,

            but the reality, for all of us eventually,

            is that it doesn’t.

It comes to an end, sooner or later,

            and then what’s left?

Some ashes to scatter, or a body to bury;

            some possessions to distribute;

            a reputation, perhaps, or some achievements of note;

            conceivably children or grandchildren

            or maybe just stories, so many stories,

                        to be told with tears and laughter

                        by those who have known and loved us

                        saying to one another, ‘do you remember when…?’

Do you remember?

Do you remember?

We’re in the season of remembrance at the moment,

            from ‘Remember, Remember the 5^th of November’

            to today’s and tomorrow’s Remembrance services

                        and two minutes silences.

And at such times,

            we particularly remember those who have been killed in war,

            those whose lives came to a premature and violent end,

                        leaving loved ones to grieve and cope.

Last week, I paid a visit to the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede

            and there, amongst the thousands upon thousands of names

                        which have been carved into the stone walls,

            I found the memorial to my maternal grandfather,

                        Sgt Frederick David King, DFM,

            a young man killed just a few weeks after his wedding day,

                        leaving a widow,

                                    yet to discover that she was pregnant with my mother,

                        and a few medals that now sit in a case at my parents’ house,

                                    speaking to us from beyond the grave

                                    of his bravery and valour in the face of danger.

And it matters to us that we remember the names, doesn’t it?

            It matters that the stories and the people are not lost to us.

This is one of the reasons why we have books of remembrance,

            keeping the person’s name and memory alive.

And it’s the reason we often mark a person’s grave with a stone,

            with their name carved as a permanent record

                        of the fact that they were once alive.

But, as anyone who has wandered through an old graveyard will know,

            eventually the stones weather, and the names and dates fade.

And books can be lost or destroyed,

            and even revered war memorials won’t last eternally.

Eventually, Sgt Fred King’s name and memory will be lost,

            as so many others, both before him and since,

            have also passed into obscurity.

And what then?

            Who remembers?

            Who keeps the memory alive?

            What becomes of what was once a person?

Such things were obviously preying on Job’s mind,

            as we heard in our reading this morning,

where Job cries out:

"O that my words were written down!

            O that they were inscribed in a book! 

O that with an iron pen and with lead

            they were engraved on a rock forever!”

For those of you who haven’t read the book of Job in a while,

            a brief recap might be useful.

The book of Job is named after it’s protagonist,

            about whom we don’t know a lot

                        (he is, after all, a fictional character).

            But what we do know, is that he is an innocent man.

Yet, despite his innocence,

            he suffers loss and pain through no fault of his own.

As the dialogue of the book develops,

            with Job and his friends discussing

                        what he has done to deserve such torment,

            Job starts to imagine a way in which he might go to trial with God,

                        seeking to vindicate his righteousness,

            and perhaps also to obtain an acknowledgment

                        of God’s mistreatment of Job.

In our passage for this morning,

            we meet Job in characteristically depressive mood,

                        clearly not expecting to see the desired vindication

                                    before his death,

                        and concerned that he will go to the grave unjustified.

In chapter 16, he calls on the earth to not let

            his murder at God’s hand, as he sees it, go unavenged.

He wants his innocent blood to continue crying out,

            arguing his vindication for all eternity.

In an echo of God’s words to Cain after his murder of his brother Abel,

            Job expresses hope that that the blood of his death

            will continue to cry out from the ground:

“O earth, do not cover my blood;

            let my outcry find no resting place.” (Job 16:18)

This idea of shed blood crying out from the ground,

            attesting to the righteousness of those

                        who have been un-righteously killed

            is one which continues to have great resonance today.

From Rupert Brooke’s heart-rending assertion that

            in the event of his death in war

            there will be ‘some corner of a foreign field

                        that is for ever England’,

to the poppy fields of Flanders,

to the mass graves of the 2^nd world war concentration camps,

            to more recent discoveries in Bosnia, Iraq and Syria…

the blood of the slain cries out from the ground,

            and it shouts and screams to the world

            that those who lie here did not deserve to die in this way.

And so Job contemplates his death;

            a righteous and innocent man

            who doesn’t deserve to die like this.

Job’s anxious desire is that he should ‘see’ God judge his case while he is alive,

            but he doesn’t, frankly, expect to be vindicated before his death,

so, despite his conviction that ‘in the end’ he will be judged innocent (v.25),

            he wants his case committed to permanent writing,

because he knows that whilst his life may be fleeting and soon-ended,

            the fact of his righteousness is an eternal truth,

            and his hope is that one day,

                        the record of his blamelessness will be attested before God

                        and will be proven to be true.

And so Job utters possibly the most famous words in the entire book,

            and possibly also the most misunderstood:

‘For I know that my Redeemer lives,

            and that at the last he will stand upon the earth’ (19.25).

Despite it’s usage within the Christian tradition…

            (and who, on hearing this verse,

                        doesn’t also hear the strains of Handel’s Messiah?)

But despite this,

            Job’s redeemer is not Jesus,

            and it isn’t God either.

Rather, Job’s ‘redeemer’ is his protestation of his innocence,

            it is his righteousness itself that pleads his cause

                        and will secure his redemption.

Job’s ‘redeemer’ isn’t some heavenly being,

            rather, it is his own declaration of innocence.

To understand why this is the case,

            we need to understand a little bit

                        about the Old Testament concept of redemption.

The world translated here as ‘redeemer’

            can also be translated as ‘vindicator’ or ‘champion’

and in the Levitical law,

            a person’s redeemer, or vindicator, or champion,

            was their nearest relative.

So, when a person died,

            their next of kin would be expected

                        to redeem their property for the family,

                        by buying it back to secure the family’s inheritance.

                        (Lev 25.25-34).

Or if a person was taken into slavery,

            their next of kin would be expected

                        to redeem them by paying the price for their release.

                        (Lev 25.47-54).

Or if a man died childless,

            their next of kin would be expected to marry their widow

                        and father a child with her on behalf of the dead husband.

                        (Deut 25.5-10; Ruth 3.12; 4.1-6).

Or if a person was murdered,

            their next of kin would be expected to vindicate them

                        by avenging their shed blood. (Num 35.12, 19-27).

So when Job states his belief

            that his redeemer, his vindicator, his champion, lives,

            he is objectifying his protestation of his innocence

                        into an entity that has something of an existence of its own.

His blood that will cry out from the ground for all eternity,

            his deeds that are written in writing that never fades,

            take on the character of an eternal affidavit of innocence.

The legal language continues,

            as Job states that his redeemer

            will, at the last, stand upon the earth.

In an ancient lawsuit trial,

            the last to rise was the winner of the dispute,

                        the final speaker won the day,

            the successful voice was granted the last word,

and Job believes that his blood crying out from the ground,

            will, at the last, rise up to affirm his innocence,

            and attest that his death was neither deserved nor sought.

So, what remains of a person when they are gone?

            What is remembered?

Job’s answer is that it is righteousness that endures eternally.

Bodies die, possessions are redistributed,

            children go their own way,

                        and reputations and mighty deeds are easily sullied or forgotten.

But a person’s righteousness? That’s a different story.

            Innocence from guilt is eternal

            and blameless deeds endure.

And so we come to the woman with her seven husbands.

            And once again we find ourselves in the murky world

                        of the kinsman-redeemer laws of the ancient Jews,

            And once again we find ourselves grappling with the question

                        of what remains of a person when they die.

There was a view that the value of a person’s life

            could be judged on whether they had managed

                        to bring children into the world,

            with a childless man’s life considered incomplete.

So, if a man died leaving a widow still of childbearing age,

            that man’s life could be redeemed

                        if he had a brother who would take his widow,

                        and father a child with her on behalf of the dead brother,

            so that the dead brother could live on through his descendants.

Clearly, this system is intensely problematic from a contemporary perspective,

            and it raises huge issues for us surrounding the rights of the woman,

            and her existence as a person in her own right,

                        rather than as part of the estate of her husband.

But within the worldview of the ancient near east,

            it had a certain logical consistency,

and it is this logic that the Sadducees are seeking to exploit,

            by making their argument Reductio ad absurdum

                        about the one bride for seven brothers,

            as they sought to demonstrate the irrationality

                        of a belief in the afterlife.

It all hinges around this question

            of what happens when a person dies.

What remains of them?

            How do they live on beyond the grave?

Is it through children, as the levirate law implied?

            Or is it through reputation and good deeds,

                        as the Sadducees believed,

            Or is it through some future resurrection to an afterlife,

                        as the Sadducees very definitely did not believe?

Jesus’ reply to the challenge of the Sadducees,

            takes us to an eternal truth of being,

            which is that nothing good is ever lost.

I’ll say that again:

            nothing good is ever lost.

In answer to the question of what remains of a person when they are dead,

            Jesus replies:

“Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living;

            for to him all are alive.” (Luke 20:38)

Descendants may die out,

            reputations and good deeds may be forgotten,

grave stones may weather to illegibility,

            and the writing in books may fade to nothing.

But God remembers…

            each moment is held safe by God,

            each instant of life finds eternity within the love of God,

Because God ‘is God not of the dead, but of the living;

            for to him all are alive.’

It may well be that the greatest service we can pay to the dead

            is to remember their righteous needs,

            and to ensure that they are not forgotten.

This, after all, is why we have remembrance Sunday,

            to remember the dead in war,

            and to ensure that the precious gift of their lives

                        doesn’t pass into obscurity.

We remember their deaths,

            but we also hear their voices:

            their blood crying out to us from the ground.

And what do the voices of the dead say to us today?

            Tales of valour, stories of bravery, honour, and loyalty, yes.

            But also, because we are remembering those dead in war,

                        stories of mercy, compassion,

                                    betrayal, suffering, terror,

                                                and of so many lives lost.

And the voice of Jesus, echoing to us down the millennia,

            assures us that each of these lives, remembered or not,

                        was a life that has eternal value.

            Each soldier has worth:

                        named or unknown,

                                    decorated officer or cannon-fodder Tommy;

            and in our remembrance of them

                        their voices are heard once again,

                        crying out from the ground for vindication, for redemption.

And they live still,

            they live among us through our act of remembrance,

                        and in our memories as we keep their memory alive.

Their stories matter to us because they keep us all human,

            and their blood cries out to us from the ground,

            protesting that they didn’t deserve to die like this.

But they live still, not just because we remember them,

            but because God remembers them.

Each life matters eternally to God,

            and nothing good is ever lost.

And this is true for them,

            and it is true for us also.

Whether we die a valiant death in the theatre of war,

            or in one of a million more ordinary ways,

Whether we die alone at home, or cared for in hospital,

            or suddenly early, or peacefully at the end of along life,

However and whenever we die,

            we too are remembered by God.

All the good life that we have lived

            is not lost at the moment of our passing,

but is held safe for all eternity

            in the loving embrace of the God of love,

who will not see even a flickering spark of life extinguished.

This is life eternal,

            this is the hope of resurrection.

And it begins today,

            eternity in each present moment.

For God ‘is God not of the dead, but of the living;

            for to him all are alive.’