Remembrance Sunday - All Alive to God

​Remembrance Sunday - All are Alive to God (Luke 20:27–38)

“He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to Him all are alive.”

On this Remembrance Sunday, we pause to remember the countless men and women who laid down their lives in times of war, those who endured unimaginable suffering, and those whose futures were lost so that others might live in peace.  We remember, too, those who continue to serve in places of conflict today, and we pray for the day when war shall be no more.

But today’s Gospel reading might, at first, seem far removed from the solemness of this occasion.
In Luke 20, Jesus is confronted by the Sadducees, a first century Jewish Religious a group that denied the resurrection. They pose a tricky, almost mocking question about a woman who, under ancient law, marries seven brothers in succession, each of whom dies. “In the resurrection,” they ask, “whose wife will she be?”

It’s not really a question about marriage at all. It’s a question about whether life continues beyond the grave. It’s an invitation to hope.  And that’s what makes it deeply fitting for today.

We begin firstly by looking at the question beneath the question: 

In the passage, the Sadducees were asking what many people still ask today: Is there really life after death?  After the horrors of war, the trenches, the concentration camps, the bombings—can we still believe that there is something beyond? Is it possible that death does not in fact have the final word?

It is precisely here that Jesus gives one of his most profound answers. He says, “The children of this age marry and are given in marriage; but those in the age to come can no longer die, for they are like angels … for they are children of God, being children of the resurrection.”

And then he adds these words that cut through centuries of doubt:  “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”

What does Jesus mean?  It seems that Jesus is suggesting is that that all life is held in God. even those we think of as gone are, in some mysterious way, alive in God’s presence.

When Moses stood before the burning bush, God identified himself as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Jesus draws a simple but astonishing conclusion: If God is their God, and if God’s relationship with them continues, then they are not gone, they live still, in God.

This is what gives meaning to our remembering today. We do not remember the dead merely as figures of the past. We remember them as souls still alive in the heart of God today, still part of the great communion of life that binds heaven and earth together.

This insight resonates with what we hear today from people who have had near-death experiences, accounts that invite us to rethink what it means to die. One of the most remarkable of these is the case of Pam Reynolds, who underwent a rare brain operation in which her body was cooled and her brain activity completely stopped. During the procedure her eyes were taped shut so that she couldn’t see with her eyes or even open them, and loud lawn-mower type noise was being played into her ears to monitor if she was showing any brain activity, to make sure that she was in fact brain dead during the procedure.  And despite all of these things, during that time, when she was for all practical purposes clinically dead, Pam later reported floating above her body, seeing the surgeons at work, and accurately describing surgical instruments and conversations that took place while she had no measurable brain function and while her eyes were taped shut.  And despite the loud noise in her ears that should have made physical hearing impossible to her, especially because there was no brain activity, she even remembered the song playing in the operating theatre (Hotel California). Her experience startled even the medical team and continues to be studied as powerful evidence that consciousness may continue beyond the body.

Stories like these (and there are many), though each must be approached with humility and discernment, nevertheless suggest that awareness and life extend beyond the body. They hint, as Jesus did, that God is indeed “the God of the living”, that consciousness is not extinguished at death, but continues in another form, another dimension of divine life.

Even St Paul seems to have come to this realisation more fully over time. In his early letters, Paul spoke of those who had died as “asleep” until the day of resurrection. But in his later writings, such as in Philippians, his tone changes: “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.”  It is as though Paul had glimpsed a deeper truth: that beyond the veil of this life, there is not unconscious waiting, but immediate communion with the Divine Presence. 

Thirdly in light of this verse from Jesus, it would suggest that to remember is more than to recall names and dates from the past it is in fact an act of faith.  When we stand in silence on a day like today, we are standing in a sense between two worlds, between the seen and the unseen.

In that silence, we hold before God not only the tragedy of war, but also the mystery of love that endures beyond death, and the deep act of faith that in some mysterious way, those who we remember live on, not just in our memories, but in the wider life of God. 

As the poet Laurence Binyon wrote:

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.”

The power of those words lies not in the sadness they express, but in the faith they imply, that those who gave their lives are still known, still cherished, still alive to and in God.

Fourthly this passage invites us to  Live in the Light of Resurrection -

Jesus’ words in Luke 20 invite us not only to believe in life after death at some point in the future, but to live as people of resurrection here and now. If God is the God of the living, then life itself is sacred, all of life. We cannot honour the dead by perpetuating the hatreds that caused their deaths. We honour them by committing ourselves to peace, to working courageously, and counter to our natural inclinations, to breaking the cycles of vengeance and violence that still ensnare the world.

It is sometimes said that to err is human, to forgive is divine. I think it could also be said: to wish for revenge is human, to work for peace is divine. In the words of St Paul, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” And it is precisely because we believe that our life in God transcends this world that we are strengthened to do so, just as it was precisely because Jesus knew that his life had come from God and that he would be returning to God that he could give his life away in love for the world. 

The resurrection faith that Jesus speaks of is not an escape from the world’s suffering, it is the power to transform it.  It is the assurance that love is stronger than death, and that even amid war’s darkest shadows, the light of God is not extinguished.

And so on this Remembrance Sunday, may therefore remember not only the lives lost, but the hope that sustaines us. May we remember that even in the ruins of the world, faith declares: He is not the God of the dead, but of the living for all are alive to God.