Upside Down World: Children of the Resurrection
a reflection on Brian Zahnd’s sermon for Sunday, November 9th, 2024
This is the first of two sermon reflections for Sunday, November 9, 2025. In this essay I share my reflections about Brian Zahnd’s sermon, called Children of the Resurrection, on Luke 20:27-40.
This image is upside down.
The Question about the Resurrection
27 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[b] 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 any more, 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.’ 39 Then some of the scribes answered, ‘Teacher, you have spoken well.’ 40 For they no longer dared to ask him another question.
In the passage from Luke, Jesus debates the Sadducees about the resurrection and brothers marrying the same women in succession, called Levirate marriage. Jesus explains that sexual reproduction doesn’t happen in the resurrected world. He says flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of g-d. The flesh body gets buried when we die and the spirit body gets resurrected, it becomes immortal. We become the children of the resurrection. When He appears we will be like Him. Think Athanasius, who said G-d became man so that man could become G-d.
The Sadducees don’t believe in the resurrection because they say the Torah doesn’t talk about it. Yet in the burning bush, what does G-d say? In Exodus 3:16, through the the Burning Bush G-d describes Himself to Moses as “…the Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, of Isaac…” G-d reveals Himself as “I am who I am,” the Hebrew Tetragrammaton derived from the Hebrew verb to be, and gives us a sense of G-d as He who is the cause of all things, or He who brings things into being. Jesus reminds the Sadducees to think of G-d not as the g-d of the dead, rather as g-d of the the living. The prophets live today, the live in the resurrected Jesus.
Scroll up and look at the photo of Bear Lake. Think about how the mountain sustains its reflection. BZ reminds us of Gregory of Nazianzus, who wrote the following about humans as animals en route to our mysterious homeland, and as we walk towards home we do so in an uncertain shadow world.
“The great Architect of the universe conceived and produced a being endowed with both natures, visible and invisible. He created a being at once earthly and heavenly, insecure and immortal, visible and invisible, halfway between greatness and nothingness, flesh and spirit at the same time; an animal en route to another native land, and, most mysterious of all, made to resemble God by simple submission to the divine will.”
Think of the true, good, beautiful the transcendentals—echoes of heaven. Through the transcendentals we get glimpses of heaven on earth. We have become blind and heartened to these things, modernity has conditioned us to shut out and dismiss the spiritual aspects of our world and our life.
In The Weight of Glory, CS Lewis says “almost our whole education has been directed to silencing the shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.” In his fiction writing, CS Lewis made forgotten heaven a common theme, especially in The Chronicles of Narnia. Throughout the Chronicles, the children find their way into Narnia through various earthly portals. The series ends with The Last Battle, in which Narnia gains liberation. In the final chapter, “Farewell to Shadowlands,” whilst riding a train, the children get jolted into Narnia. Aslan arrives, notices they’re not as happy as he wants them to be, the children respond that they’re afraid of being sent back. Aslan tells them they’re here in Narnia to stay. There was a railway accident and they’re dead. For us, the reader, the story has come to an end, and for the children the story has just begun and will never end.
There’s no intermediate period between death and heaven. The children of Narnia have become children of the resurrection. Time slows when we travel at fast speed. In his book Pauline Dogmatics, Douglas Campbell writes about this. This seems like a novel conception, and it’s not — Von Balthazar and Gerhadt Lofink wrote about this stuff. We enter Parousia (a Greek word meaning arrival) when we die and experience the second coming at the same time. Writes Gerhard Lohfink, in Is This All There Is? On Resurrection and Eternal Life,
“Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing the shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. Christ’s parousia will be a coming to all people, without exception, who encounter Christ in their death together and simultaneously. Many theologians today speak of resurrection in death. Conclusion: The deceased is no longer subject to earthly time but in death has already arrived at the resurrection of all the dead.”
BZ ends his sermon on the good news of the gospel with a quote from Revelation 22:20-21. “The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.”
We live, sleeping, in a dream state, and we will wake up when we die away from this dream state. We are the children of g-d and we will become the children of the resurrection.