Jesus is faced with a trick question — one that isn’t really about faith at all.
The Sadducees, who didn’t believe in the resurrection, present him with a tangled riddle about marriage and the afterlife, a question designed to expose the absurdity of belief in life beyond death.
Jesus gives a brief response but really sidesteps the trap. Jesus won’t play their game of legal definitions and hypothetical scenarios. Instead, Jesus opens a window into something larger: “God is not God of the dead, but of the living; for to God all of them are alive.” (38)
At the Lindisfarne community’s recent retreat at All Hallow’s Tide, on the Saturday afternoon I reflected on the ancestors. Samhain is a threshold time, when summer’s abundance gives way to winter’s dark. When the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is at its thinnest or is seen as porous. Rather than fearing death, at Samhain death was recognised as part of earth’s sacred cycle, decay giving birth to new life. When ancestors are honoured it is a way of acknowledging what is already true: that they are part of a great communion of life, stretching backward and forward. At the retreat we pondered our own lineage both familial and spiritual but in addition to looking back, we looked forward to those each of us will love, nourish and protect.
Remembrance Sunday invites this very same awareness. It is not only about loss, though that loss is very real. My family, like most in the UK, lost friends and relatives to the Great war. But more than loss, it is about continuity. About the lives that were given, the love that was shared, the courage that endured. None of it has vanished, it has become part of the living fabric of the world.
Jesus roots his argument in grammar — “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” (37) Not I was. God speaks in the present tense because divine relationship does not expire with breath. The living and the dead belong together in God’s remembering.
That thought is both humbling and consoling. It reminds me that death is not an erasure but a change of condition. Life goes on.
So, as the days shorten and autumn deepens toward winter — in our Celtic calendar winter (Samhain) is already here. The trees shed their leaves, but life goes on beneath the surface. The soil rests but still hums with potential protecting and nourishing. So, the year turns, and so do I (each gray hair reminds me of it!). It is part of the cycle of life. That pattern of dying and rising, letting go and becoming again. I want to reframe resurrection not as life after death but as life beyond boundaries — life that cannot be contained or undone.
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When I whisper the names of those who have gone before,
I do not call into absence but into presence.
For in God’s great remembering, all are alive —
the earth, the ancestors, the yet-to-be.
Life goes on,
and love, being divine,
forgets no one.
