Ambiguous Afterlives

Reflections on the Lectionary for November 6th

One of the knocks against many religions—and against Christianity specifically, and especially against certain forms of Christianity—is that it functions mostly as “fire insurance.” That is, critics say, religion is just a way to hedge your bets about the afterlife—to set things up so that in case it turns out that there is a heaven and a hell and a vengeful God, that you will be spending the afterlife in comfort and not in torment. This is a logic of religion that does not, by any means, apply to all religions; it’s a very specifically Christian way of seeing things, and even within Christianity it’s far from a universal way of understanding the afterlife. (Many Christians don’t believe in an afterlife, or live agnostically about it without troubling themselves over it, or see the afterlife as a simple matter of baptism and ritual efficacy). But the afterlife is a consistent anxiety for a lot of religious folks, and especially for a lot of Christians.

Ancient people sometimes shared this same anxiety. It didn’t always take the same form as it takes for us—perhaps there were no billboards on the highway through Judea that aggressively asked “IF YOU DIE TONIGHT DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU WILL GO?” But people in the past asked, the same as us, about the durability of the self and the possibilities of life continuing after death. They also felt the anxiety that comes from observing that time is long and human life is short, and they also felt curiosity about what might be waiting for us after this life is over. This week’s lectionary texts collect a few of the passages in the bible where this anxiety bubbles up to the surface, framing the question of the afterlife differently in different times and places, but giving a broad view of some different ways we can imagine a life to come.

The first of these is a passage that everyone thinks is about an afterlife, but actually probably is not: Job 19:23-37a. Job is unique within the Hebrew Bible as an extended meditation on the question of suffering and loss—the kind of thing that has long resonated with people who are experiencing those things in their lives. This little passage that the lectionary lifts out this week records Job’s famous declaration: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God.” People take this as Job’s statement of faith, a triumphant claim about his faith that God will return to intervene in the world and save God’s people. (Christians often take this passage to refer to Jesus’ return specifically). That’s an old and persistent reading of this passage, but it doesn’t make much sense in context. These verses come in the middle of the book of Job, in the midst of a prolonged crisis of health, family, meaning, and faith. They come as Job is wrestling with a series of tragedies that have befallen him and his loved ones, which we as the readers know come as a test from God. Usually, Christians read Job’s statement in 19:25-26 as a reaffirmation of faith. But in context, Job’s words are almost the opposite of what we suppose. Rather than stating trust in God, Job’s words are a cry for a redeemer—an advocate who would take his side—in his protest and contest against God. Job isn’t declaring trust in God in spite of his troubled body; he’s calling for support in his accusations of injustice on the part of God. And he’s not pointing to an afterlife; he’s insisting that he get his hearing in this world, here and now, to make the case for the injustice of what he has experienced. This strikes me as a more accurate depiction of a person in the midst of suffering: crying out about the injustice that is afflicting them, and asking where God might be in the midst of it.

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5 and 13-17 is likewise a passage that is born out of a bit of ambiguity and angst. This letter is attributed to Paul, although many (most) modern scholars do not think that Paul wrote it. Rather, many scholars think that someone wrote this in Paul’s name, using his writing style and playing with his themes. Why would someone do that? Well, one plausible reason is that the author felt that events had changed such that Paul, if he were still alive, would have wanted to chime in on them. Specifically, things had changed around the question of time. When he was alive, Paul preached an apocalyptic message, warning that the world was changing rapidly, encouraging people to be ready for the immanent return of Jesus. In fact, it’s in his first letter to the Thessalonians that this shows up most clearly, in chapter 4. There, Paul is writing to explain to the people in Thessalonica that while some of their loved ones had died, hope was not lost. Apparently when he was in their city, Paul had left them with the impression that Jesus’ return was coming very soon, so when some of the folks began to die, they wondered if Paul had been wrong. So someone wrote a follow-up letter in Paul’s name, explaining that the promise of Jesus’ return had not failed, but that it simply had not arrived yet. “Hold firm,” the letter goes, and that is the message: don’t lose hope. This isn’t about the afterlife, explicitly, but it does reveal an undercurrent of anxiety about how and when Jesus’ return might be coming, and what that might say about God’s plans for the redemption of the people and redemption of the world. People crave understanding about what happens in the future, including what happens when we die.

Finally, in Luke 20:27-38, we see a conversation explicitly about the afterlife—about the “resurrection,” as Jesus and his conversation partners put it. Jesus is having a discussion with the Sadducees, which is a group with which he is not frequently depicted as having a relationship. The Sadducees probably represent something like an old guard, composed of temple priests and associated parties, and Luke tells us that they didn’t believe in a resurrection. (Not very many Jews did in this period). Their question is a good one, designed to push on the claims of those who say that there is a resurrection. Probably, their target was less Jesus himself, and more the Pharisees, another sect of Jews during this time, and one that (like Jesus) believed in a resurrection. The Sadducees’ question pushed on the logic of resurrection: are we raised just as we were in this life, with all of our relationships and status restored to us? If so, what do we do about the fact that people change over time? Are we resurrected at the moment of death, or at some earlier “restore point” in our lives? Their question specifically gets at the question of marriage; what happens, they ask, if someone is married more than once? Which spouse are they married to in the life to come? It’s a good question, and perhaps one that some modern people have asked as well.

The scenario proposed by the Sadducees, by the way, envisions an arrangement called a Levirate marriage. If a man dies childless, his closest relative (usually a brother) is required to enter into a “marriage” with the widow and conceive a child, who if it is a boy will be the heir of the dead man. This kind of marriage is probably what’s behind the story of the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, and something like it is behind the stories of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz and the story of Tamar and Judah in the Hebrew Bible.

Jesus’ answer dodges the question. I can’t imagine that the Sadducees were very satisfied, although they probably went away feeling like they got the upper hand in the conversation. Their challenge to Jesus successfully showed that the politics and relational dynamics of the afterlife must be very confusing—a kind of infinite accumulation of people in one post-death space. Jesus’ answer gestures toward this—“they are like angels,” he says—and presumably not subject to the same complications as regular people.

All three of these stories reflect our anxiety about what happens after we die. In Job, that anxiety is not in the text so much as it’s around the text, in the ways people have read and interpreted it. In 2 Thessalonians, that anxiety is the pretext for the letter to be written at all; people were really nervous about the timeline described by Paul and wanted to know if Jesus was still going to return. In Luke, we see Jesus and some Sadducees try to work out, in real time, how an afterlife would even work. Together, they don’t really provide us with any firm understanding of the afterlife, but they do show us how much we have invested in it—and in our own mortality and potential immortality. We want to know what remains of us after we die, and what might move on into the future even after we are gone. That’s not knowable in any conventional sense, so we wring our hands about it and spin our scenarios, like the passage in Luke.

As for me, I find myself comforted by the Christian remembrance of All Saints Day, which many people celebrated either last Sunday or will celebrate this coming Sunday. All Saints Day situates memory within community, and it claims that we remain in relationship with all the saints who have gone before us and all the people who will come after us. Afterlife need not be in heaven on a cloud somewhere, but it consists of being a part of something transtemporal, a chain of memory and remembrance and practice that began long before us and will remain after we are gone. I am content with the idea that one day I will rest within such a chain of memory, and that in that sense some part of me will live on when I am gone.