Hindsight

Luke 20: 27-38

Today our celebrant took a different slant on the lesson from Luke's Gospel: the familiar story of the Sadducees questioning Jesus about a woman who had outlived seven brothers, each one having been her husband. So... they asked, at the resurrection, who's wife would she be?

It was in the answer, quoted from the Torah, she said, that Jesus demonstrated his brilliance and his knowledge of God, and of the difficult understanding of resurrection. "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob" God told Moses. I AM. Not I was, because now, of course, they are dead.

This concept of resurrection rests in the present, in the now, not in the future of generations of children to carry your DNA forward, not in a future judgment day when all hell will break loose and you will go either to eternal bliss or to eternal damnation... but here and now, in this very present moment where God lives, whether we can see signs of His blessing or not. In an alternate reading for today, Job claims that exact concept for himself, in spite of everything he has lost. For I know that my redeemer lives... whom I shall see on my side...

The charge, then, was to look for blessing when there is no sign of blessing, to believe in the blessing and claim it, declare it, in the present moment. I have been struggling with this problem on the shallowest of levels these past few days. By all outward appearances nothing was moving forward. It was only after I surrendered my desperate need to know the concrete plans for my future that I was told the plans had, in fact, been made and all was well.

Hindsight, as they say, has twenty-twenty vision.