Hi! I’ll be your guide.

I’ll be your G-U-I-D-E to the other side!

Don’t go to the Netherworld,

Did I say Netherworld? Nevermind!

This is how the character Beetlejuice, introduces himself to the recently deceased Barbara and Adam in the musical theater version of Beetlejuice. That’s right friends, this one is for all the theater kids, and for the afterlife skeptics, and for anyone who like Lydia would describe themselves as strange and unusual, even those of you who have only seen the Tim Burton movie, even though I think it is not quite as good as the musical is.

If you haven’t seen it, the story of Beetlejuice revolves around a ghost couple who get trapped in their house after they die there, and Beetlejuice, a demon, who appears to offer them his haunting services to drive away the living, so that they can have their earthly home all to themselves once again. The only catch? A living person needs to say his name three times to unleash his powers. Which is where Lydia comes in. A goth teen, struggling with her mom’s death, and many other crazy family dynamics, who just so happens to move into their home, and much hilarity ensues.

Beetlejuice’s version of the afterlife is complicated, so complicated in fact, that every ghost receives their own “handbook for the recently deceased” upon dying. Since it is a lot to take in, Barbara and Adam are easily led astray by Beetlejuice and his plot to keep them from proceeding directly to the Netherworld, as the handbook says. The Sadducees in Mark chapter 12 kind of remind me of Beetlejuice, because they also seem to think that the afterlife is really complicated, and that Jesus can provide them with a handbook for it, or at least he must know what the rules are.

That is, if the afterlife is even real, because the Sadducees were known for their skepticism about the supernatural. I learned to remember who they were because they were so “sad, you see” because they didn’t believe in the resurrection. Now, I don’t know if they were really that sad, but it is true that the Sadducees didn’t believe in concepts like angels, eternal souls, or most notably, bodily resurrection. An idea which started gaining traction about 150 years before Jesus during the Maccabean revolt, where the promise of resurrection was a motivation for the Jewish rebels. But even in the days of Jesus, there wasn’t a consensus in the Jewish community about what happens after we die. The Hebrew Bible talks about the afterlife in vague terms. In the oldest books it’s joining your ancestors, and later a place called Sheol, not a punishment, but just a shadowy underworld where your soul kinda hangs around.

However, there is a pervasive message in the Hebrew Bible of God’s restorative power. The idea that God can bring people and things back to life. Isaiah prophesies “Your dead shall live, dead bodies shall arise – awake and sing you who dwell in the earth! – for your dew is like the dew on fresh growth. You make the land of shades come to life.” According to the prophet Ezekiel, God can even make dry bones live again, and in the book of Daniel, who was known for his visions, he says “Many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to eternal life, some to everlasting abhorrence.” But the question is – what does that mean? It’s not clear if we’re talking about all people or just some of them, when exactly this will happen, and the logistics of everyone suddenly being alive again on Earth. What would resurrected bodies even be like? Will they look the same or totally different? Will they need food and water?  What will we do once resurrected, just get back to life as usual? These questions have many different answers.

The idea of bodily resurrection usually comes up in connection with divine justice, the idea that God will lift up the righteous and strike down the wicked – even if it doesn’t happen in this lifetime. The sentiment is that eventually, God will turn the power imbalances of the world upside down and end the oppression of God’s people, who will live again in that new day.  But still, not everyone in Jesus’ time agreed about it, for example, the Sadducees. They were a group of skeptics and aristocrats. They were the wealthy maintainers of the Temple and viewed by some as corrupt for collaborating with the Roman empire. In the book of Acts, they are one of the groups who persecute the disciples and their new movement. The Sadducees did not believe that there was a resurrection coming. They did their priestly duties, reaped the benefits of it, and that was enough for them.

So when this guy Jesus starts hanging around, getting people all stirred up about the idea of eternal life, they come up with this ridiculous scenario to try to get him to admit how silly this whole idea of resurrection is. What would happen, if one poor unfortunate woman, was married to a guy, and he died, so she married his brother, who also died, so she married another brother, who (you guessed it) then also died, and that process repeated until she finally dies after being married to all seven brothers. Who should she spend her eternity with after the resurrection?

It is as if they expect Jesus to pull out the handbook for the recently resurrected and point to paragraph 3, subsection c where it outlines marriage laws for the afterlife and what to do in cases with multiple spouses. In the scenario they’ve cooked up, this woman is little more than a possession to be legally assigned to whoever has the most claim over her. As if she is a car that has had several owners, and must ultimately belong to just one of them, rather than being her own person with her own afterlife to enjoy. Nobody thinks to ask her opinion about who she wants to be married to forever. Because she couldn’t possibly be married to all of them, even though a man would be fine being married to multiple women. Perhaps brother number two was actually the kindest and funniest, or maybe after being resurrected, she would prefer to have a fresh start and not be married to any of them.

This whole scenario was designed to show that life after death is a ridiculous concept, all in the hopes of making this Rabbi Jesus look bad. But I think what they actually end up doing is revealing a lot about themselves. The Sadducees had a very narrow view of what is possible, not just whether there is eternal life, but what the very order of things in that eternal life could be like. They have limited what is possible to what their own imaginations can come up with, and it seems like they expect that if there is a resurrection it will obviously follow all of the rules that they are used to and will probably look about the same as life as they knew it and look where we are now.

It doesn’t say that Jesus shakes his head at them, but I kind of think he does, as he tells them that it will be nothing like that. He makes no attempt to solve their riddle. Actually, what he says is that “When people rise from the dead they are like angels in heaven,” which was another concept that the Sadducees did not believe in. So that would be the literal furthest thing from a satisfying explanation for them. I think that’s some peak snarky Jesus right there.

To be fair, they did ask the one person who could possibly answer their question, but Jesus is not interested in hypotheticals, and so he redirects them. He reminds them of who God is, going back to the moment where God comes to Moses saying “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” All of whom were dead when God spoke to Moses from the bush, and yet somehow still alive within God, and living through in the legacy that now led to Moses standing in front of a bush, to be called to step into his own life’s calling to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt. You guys don’t even know how God works, Jesus seems to say to them, “He is God not of the dead, but of the living.” While the Sadducees are trying to pin down what will or won’t happen after death, Jesus is none too concerned with those specifics. He has way more work to do among the living.

Jesus spent his days among the sick, the poor, and the oppressed, while the Sadducees were rubbing elbows with the empire and considered themselves fortunate to be in such a position. Jesus was washing feet and multiplying loaves of bread, while the Sadducees were protecting their pristine institutions, not expecting that things could ever change, or that there might be more to the universe than what they knew about. It seems to me like they were pretty comfortable and satisfied with the status quo. Instead of tending the wounds of society they wonder about a hypothetical woman, married off to 7 different men, and who she would remain married to in the afterlife, as if that would even be any of their business. And Jesus shakes his head, at their closed off minds, at what they think they know, and that non-answer is what gives me peace. Because while humans are prone to focusing on the future and spinning anxious tales about what will be, God is focused on the task at hand.

The God of the living does not sit around, waiting for some future day to come to enact justice, God is already moving, transforming, and building God’s Kingdom, making things on Earth as they are in Heaven, coming to Earth in human form to tell people how to find life and life abundantly.  In Beetlejuice, upon realizing that they are deceased, Barbara and Adam flee to the attic of their house to hide, even though the living can’t see them. They lock themselves in the attic with all their dusty remaining belongings, and they contemplate the lives they had, not moving forward, and not able to go back. They don’t realize that they no longer need the house or the things in it. The rules of their existence have changed entirely, and all they are really trapped by is their fear of the unknown.

I have no handbook to give you, no promises that you will retain this or that part of yourself, when or if you will have a body again or not. None of that is up to me, and I’ve never been dead to tell you about it. But I take away two things from this story and how Jesus responds. First, that whatever awaits us in the afterlife, or the end of days, or the eschaton for those of you in our afterlife bible study, it will not be what we expect it to be. No matter how elaborate the possibilities we come up with are, no matter how much we study, analyze, and disagree, our eternity will be nothing like this life, probably something we cannot even imagine, and needing to know all the details about it can be like a dusty attic we trap ourselves in to ruminate.

Second, that Jesus was much more focused on how we live than what happens after we die. We heard it read that the very next conversation they have is about which commandments are the most important, and this question Jesus DOES answer.

Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. Simple instructions, not complicated ones, and in my opinion, wrestling with just those two things, and trying to do them well, is more than enough work for this lifetime. On these commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Which brings me to one last thing about Beetlejuice. At one point in the story, Lydia makes it to the Netherworld, where she has gone to look for her mom, but instead she meets a bunch of characters who are sitting in the netherworld’s waiting room. There they meet Miss Argentina, an unhappy beauty queen, and many other waiting souls who sing these words:

Why did it take death to see happiness was up to me?

If I knew then what I know now

I would’ve laughed and danced and lanced every sacred cow.

I thought I knew but I was wrong, cause life is short but death is super long.

Maybe when Jesus says that God is not the God of the dead but of the living, his point is that our lives matter, not just our afterlives. I think some people are still satisfied with living in a broken world, like the Sadducees, and just waiting around for what’s next, but we shouldn’t waste our lives thinking about what’s coming afterwards. Our relationship with God will continue, a relationship that neither height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation is able to separate us from. Your name is written on the palm of God’s hand, and God will not give you up.

My point, dear friends, is to live your life while you’re in it. We waste a lot of energy arguing and worrying about eternity. Sometimes I also feel a bit trapped in my own mind, restricted by my own imagination for what is possible on an everlasting scale. But Jesus told us to live well, to find life abundant, joy, kindness, gentleness, and peace. Life is short, but death is super long. So, let’s live deeply and meaningfully, healing ourselves and others, caring for our neighbor as ourselves, and soaking up all of God’s goodness which we can find right here and right now. This life is not a waiting room. Our home is not some far off heaven, it is everywhere that God is, which is everywhere. Home is right here all around us, on this Earth we are a part of, where the God of the living is and always has been working to build the kingdom of peace.  Amen.