103 posts 7/4/2007 10:17 pm
Last Read:
7/4/2007 10:18 pm
|
Mark 12:18-27... The Question about the Resurrection...reflect
Mark 12:18-27... The Question about the Resurrection... Reflect…
Uncertainty about the afterlife has plaued many people over the centuries. The good Socrates (470 BC-399 BC) himself, so spiritually insightful in many respects, nevertheless had these words on his lips just before dying; “I go to die and you live; but which of us goes to the better lot is known to none but God” (Plato, Apology, 42 ).
The Sadducces were in even greater darkness that Socrates. They flatly denied that there is an afterlife. Here Jesus’ demonstration of their mistake is absolutely, brilliant: if God, who is the God of the living, calls himself the God of past ancestors, it is because these ancestors are still alive. But Jesus could have gone a step further, if he had wanted to. He could have insisted that god, who dearly Abraham and the others, would never allow his loved ones to be annihilated forever. When you love someone, you want to keep that someone alive forever. And if you happen to be God, you can. This same idea is well expressed by the author Henri Nouwen, of fond memory, in his book Seeds of Hope:
“I think,” he writes, “love-deep, human love-does not know death… Real love says, ‘Forever.’ Love will always reach out toward the eternal. Love comes from that place within us where death cannot enter. Love does not accept the limits of hours, days, weeks, months, years, or centuries. Love is not willing to be imprisoned by time” (p.133 )
This basic intuition is confirmed nowadays by insights coming from different angles; the unconscious desire for immortality as uncovered by psychoanalysis, the testimony of all the great religions, the near-death experiences of thousands of people, and so forth. Could so much evidence pointing in the same direction be wrong?
|
365 Days with the Lord
|
