I heard yesterday of a man who wasn’t sure he wanted to go to heaven. In heaven, the man thought, he’d get to know everything, and wouldn’t that be boring.
The knowledge we have or aspire to in our lives is perhaps a red herring. Take one of the pieces of knowledge that passed me by as a bachelor and is of no use to me as a happily married man: the finger of the hand upon which a wedding band is worn in western society. I’d have to Google it to find out, but what then would I do with my new-found knowledge?
When a Sadducee asks Jesus about the man who’s six brothers each in turn marry his childless widow, and wonders who in heaven is married to whom, the reply is that no-one in heaven is married or given in marriage. It’s an activity irrelevant to the kingdom of heaven, so the question has no bearing on the truth of resurrection.
I’ve just watched a TV interview with a couple whose son died possibly as a result of mismanagement in the hospital to which he was admitted after a road accident. They wanted, as so many grieving parents, spouses, siblings and friends have wanted before, some ‘answers’. My fear is that no answer they get will have relevance to their relationship with their child now or in the time which is to come: a relationship in which they preserve his bedroom as it was in his life. For no-one in a position to give them answers in the medical or managerial circumstances of their son’s death is in a position to know the questions that underlie their grief, their 'un-knowing'. The One who might is God of the living, not of the dead, and his only answer in this age is to try to wrap them in love and thereby to chance rejection.
The 'love that will not let me go' is not a clinging desperate and somewhat forlorn love that we might have in our loss of someone dear to us, but rather a blessed assurance and hope that is bestowed on us even when we are lost to He who holds us dear. Such assurance and hope can only have relevance in the sureness and certainty of resurrection.
