Read: Luke 23:39-43

Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:42-43, NRSV).

What happens to us—and our loved ones—at the moment of death?

I’ll come back to that question in a moment. For now, let’s start with a story.

I was teaching an adult Sunday school class at a local congregation. This is not usually a dangerous assignment, but there was a definite fear factor in the room that day. Of course, it didn’t help that I was a seminary student. I was zealous about my topic, and a good deal younger than most of the people in the class. In short, I don’t think they trusted me any further than they could throw me and my half-finished degree.

The topic? The resurrection of the body. Everything was going well until I pointed out that this was not the same thing as the immortality of the soul. This was news to them, and they did not receive it well. I found myself with my back, literally, against the sanctuary wall. When I realized that there was a carved-in-stone copy of the Apostles’ Creed on that very wall, I pointed to the relevant phrase in in the Creed: “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” The class granted my point, but they weren’t happy about it.

I was not the only one who was afraid that day. In retrospect, I realize that they were afraid, too. They were afraid of losing the comfort that comes with knowing that we are instantly safe with God at the moment of death. For their money, the idea of the immortality of the soul seems to guarantee this. The resurrection of the body, on the other hand, seems to suggest an unspecified wait.

Nobody wants to wait around for the resurrection.

I could bore you with theories about the “intermediate state,” but this more of a pastoral problem than it is an intellectual one. We need comfort, not theories.

There is powerful comfort in Jesus’ words to the thief just one cross over. “Today you will be with me in paradise,” he says. Today. But how does that square with the resurrection of the body? some will ask. How can it be “today” if we have to wait for the general resurrection?

Maybe we need to remember that God is the original Time Lord. After all, a thousand years in God’s sight are “like yesterday when it is past” (Psalm 90:4). Or maybe we need to remember Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 15:50-52. It’s a mystery, he says. “We will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” That’s a comforting phrase if ever there was one. It suggests that even if there is a “wait,” we won’t be aware of it.

I love the way Marilynne Robinson’s character, John Ames, reflects on this in the novel, Gilead. Contemplating his own imminent death, Ames says, “I imagine a kind of ecstatic pirouette, a little bit like going up for a line drive when you’re so young that your body almost doesn’t know about effort. Paul couldn’t have meant something entirely different from that. So there’s that to look forward to.”*

Ames also gives a nod to an analogy from earlier in the chapter, where Paul points out that “what you sow does not come to life unless it dies” (1 Cor. 15: 36). In the novel, the elderly Ames is writing a letter that he hopes his infant son will read after Ames is gone. His words read well for all of us in need of both comfort and courage:

While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been, in the strength of my youth, with dear ones beside me. You read the dreams of an anxious, fuddled old man, and I live in a light better than any dream of mine—not waiting for you, though, because I want your dear perishable self to live long and to love this poor perishable world, which I somehow cannot imagine not missing bitterly…. I have wondered about that for many years. Well, this old seed is about to drop into the ground. Then I’ll know.

Ponder this short video by Todd Billings on his book, The End of the Christian Life. What does it mean to live and die in such a way that we “give ourselves over to love”?

Pray: Grant me on earth what seems Thee best, till death and Heav’n reveal the rest (Isaac Watts).

*From Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), p. 142. The passage quoted at the end of this reflection is from p. 53.

Read: Acts 17:16-34

When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you again about this” (Acts 17:32, NRSV).

I remember the conversation as if it were yesterday.

I was sitting in the refectory at Yale Divinity School with some graduate school colleagues. The topic was resurrection. (That’s the sort of thing graduate students discuss over lunch.) When I confessed that I believed in the resurrection of the body, the conversation came to an abrupt halt.

“Wait. Literally?” one of my friends asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

My colleagues exchanged glances. It was an awkward moment. Finally, one of them said, “Wow, how…quaint!”

Ouch. No self-respecting graduate student wants to be called theologically quaint.

While it’s true that I didn’t particularly appreciate that designation at the time, I’ve since come to embrace it with more equanimity. First, I now understand how I got that way. Second, I have a better appreciation for the assumptions that swirl around most discussions of this subject.

As to how I got this way—I blame the Old Testament. If you’ve been following this blog for the past few weeks, you’ll know about the Hebrew word nephesh. It’s that “package deal” that God creates in the garden in Genesis 2:7. Sometimes mistranslated as “soul,” this “living being” is a combination of physical, spiritual, and mental attributes.

Now, I know that the authors of those early chapters of Genesis were not writing science. It won’t work to wave a Hebrew word around as if it were a literal description of reality. But even if we don’t take it literally, we ought to take it seriously. This stuff in the early chapters of Genesis is meant to teach us deep truths about who we are in relation to God and the rest of creation. I, for one, think we need to pay attention.

The apostle Paul had spent his life steeped in the Hebrew scriptures as well, so he would have known all about the nephesh. And if you know about the nephesh, then the resurrection of the body—both Jesus’ and our own—comes as less of a shock. In fact, it makes a certain, thrilling sense. It’s just the kind of thing God would get up to.

Of course, it made no sense at all to most of the people Paul was talking to in the Areopagus. Steeped, not in the Old Testament, but in a dualistic view of body and soul—where the soul was clearly superior—the Greeks had no patience for Paul’s talk of resurrected bodies. Why on earth would you want your body resurrected? Good riddance to it, according to their way of thinking. So they wrote Paul off as theologically quaint and drifted off to find a better philosopher.

If you have spent your life thinking that you have an “immortal soul,” then you’re probably going to find this whole conversation disconcerting. Not only that, but you may find yourself asking painful questions about what happens to you—and to loved ones—at the moment of death. Those questions are important, so let’s consider them more carefully next time.

In the meantime, remember that “whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s” (Romans 14:8).

Ponder: How has your physical body shaped your personality? What makes you “you”?

Pray: Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my nephesh to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my nephesh to resurrect.

Read: Genesis 1:26-27

Then God said, “let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth (Genesis 1:27, NRSV).

Do pets go to heaven?

That’s a question every parent dreads. We dread it because we want to spare our children pain. (Although, if they are asking the question, it probably means they are in pain already.) But we may also dread it because we are afraid that the answer will turn them against God. (It’s bad enough that God didn’t save their pet even though they prayed really hard. Now we’re supposed to tell them that animals don’t have “souls,” and therefore, can’t go to heaven?) Or maybe we just dread the question because we don’t know what to say. (We’ve been asking it ourselves ever since we lost our first pet, and the answer isn’t any clearer to us now than it was when that loss was fresh.)

What if we are making this question harder than it needs to be?

First, let’s unpack the assumption that animals “don’t have souls.” What if I told you that in the Bible, the thing that distinguishes humans from animals is not the possession of a “soul”? Read carefully. In Genesis 1, the thing that sets humans apart from the rest of creation is that humans are created in God’s image. While it’s not entirely clear what that means, it seems to involve both honor and responsibility.

Now let’s take a look at Genesis 2. In this version of the creation story, God creates the first human from “the dust of the ground.” When God breathes on this little art project, it becomes “a living being.” Some translations mislead us by translating this as “a living soul,” but that translation says more about the translators than it does about the Hebrew text. The word at issue is nephesh. As we explained last week (see Lost in Translation), a nephesh is a package deal. It is everything that makes us who/what we are—physically, mentally, and emotionally.

But here’s the fun part: The Bible uses this same word to describe animals. It does so not once, not twice, but at least 171 times. It’s not that humans “have a soul” and animals do not. We are all living beings.

There is one thing that carries more weight on the “do pets go to heaven” question than anything else, however. Have you ever thought about the overall plot of the Bible? Sometimes we act as if it’s all about us. We even assume that the “point” of Christianity is to “go to heaven when we die.” This is so arrogant. And if that’s the best we can do, “it’s time we rubbed our eyes and read our texts again” (N. T. Wright, Simply Christian, 2006, p. 219). Read carefully. God has a much bigger agenda. The overall story arc of the Bible includes nothing less than the renewal of all creation.

Obviously, this is bigger news than just an answer to the question of whether pets go to heaven. But it’s relevant, nonetheless. If God cared enough to create the animal kingdom in the first place, then there are good biblical grounds to believe that God will include animals in the “new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1). After all, it wouldn’t be much fun without them.

So, do you have to explain all this when your child asks you if pets go to heaven? No. Just take your child in your arms and say, “Yes!” But maybe now you can say it with a little more conviction.

Ponder the words and music of the hymn, “How Can I Keep from Singing?” Listen for the line, “I catch the sweet, though far-off hymn that hails the new creation.”

Pray: Thank you for the friendship and joy that your creatures give us. Help us to entrust them to your care when it’s time to say, “Goodbye—for now.”

Read: Genesis 2:4-9

Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being (Genesis 2:7, NRSV).

Language is tricky business. Try learning another one and you’ll soon find that out. First, there are the “false friends”—words that sound like words in your own language but turn out to mean something quite different. I once tried to order iced tea in Italy. “Tè caldo,” I said confidently. It turns out caldo in Italian means “hot” (as in “cauldron”). Oops. Or the words that sound alike, but most assuredly are not. A pesca (peach) gelato is lovely, but a pesce (fish) gelato is not.

Then there are the words that get “lost in translation”—often with funny results. Like the folding chair from China with the label warning the owner not to “stand or jump on this throne.”

Then there are the linguistic misunderstandings that can have dangerous—or even deadly—consequences. I will always be grateful to the teenager at the Fourth of July party who thought twice about the fireworks instructions that read, “Point toward audience.”

Bible translations are not immune to such misunderstandings. Some of these can prove to be dangerous for our theology. Take, for instance, the Hebrew word, nephesh. This is the word behind the phrase “a living being” in Genesis 2:7. Many other translations render this word as “soul.”

So, what’s the problem, professor?

It’s not so much one problem, as several in sequence. First, there is the problem of finding an English word that captures what a Hebrew nephesh is. In short, there isn’t one. A nephesh is what we might call a “package deal.” It’s everything that makes us who/what we are—physically, mentally, and emotionally. English has nothing for this. Sometimes you just have to learn a new word.

But now we have arrived at the second problem. Translators don’t want to learn a new word. It feels like a defeat. So, they scrounge around in their own language until they find a word that they think will work—as if it were as simple as slapping an equals sign between two words that aren’t really the same at all. This is a bad idea. (Remember our conversation about peaches and fish? Yuck.) And yet, many translators use the word “soul” to translate the word nephesh.

What do you think of when you hear the word “soul”? Merriam-Webster defines it as the “spiritual part of a person.” The soul is seen as being distinct from—and superior to—the body.

Welcome to the third problem. A soul is not a nephesh. Remember the “package deal”? There is no body in soul. That’s why—in our culture—we talk about body and soul. So, in the time that it takes to make one bad translational decision, we have imported a whole set of assumptions that have no business in this part of the Bible. Yuck.

Again I hear you asking, What’s the problem, professor?

Maybe we should stop talking about problems. Let’s talk about possibilities instead.

• Would you like to know why Christians affirm the resurrection of the body and not the immortality of the soul? (Oh, my gosh—we do? Yes. Check your copy of the Apostles’ Creed.)
• Would you like to know why your body is good, and why sex is part of God’s good creation? (Wait. They are? Yes. Both are flawed, but both are God’s good ideas.)
• Would you like to know why your pet will go to heaven? (But professor, animals don’t have souls? How is that possible? Wait until next week. I’ll tell you.)

Every single one of these questions is addressed by this notion of the nephesh. In the coming weeks, tune in for more episodes of what my students call, “Professor Bechtel explains it all.” We’ll do our best not to get lost in translation.

Ponder: What surprised you most about the Hebrew word nephesh? Does it change anything about the way you see yourself?

Pray: We praise you, O God, for we are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14).

Read: Genesis 1

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day (Genesis 1:31, NRSV).

“How many times do I have to tell you….?”

Most of us have been on the receiving end of this rhetorical question. It doesn’t really require an answer, and if we gave one, we would be in even more trouble.

God must have considerable sympathy for exasperated parents who ask this question. After all, God tells us not once, not twice, but seven times in Genesis 1 that creation is good. But evidently, seven times is not enough, because we still need reminding.

In the introductory class that I teach on the Old Testament, we take extra time with the book of Genesis. “Well begun is half done,” I tell my seminarians. There are things in this book that are simply worth taking extra time over or the results can be disastrous. It’s a bit like taking extra time when planning a trip. If you’re not careful you may end up somewhere you do not want to go. Hawaii and Hoboken both start with “H,” but they are very different places.

So, what are the risks of ignoring God’s repeated reminder that creation is good?

Have you ever encountered Christians who cared more about saving “souls” than saving lives? Never mind that you are starving; here’s a Bible.

Have you noticed how easy it is to treat living things as commodities? Why shouldn’t we cut down the rain forests? They’re just trees, for goodness’ sake.

Have you ever been taught that the body is bad and the spirit is good? And we wonder why we’re confused about sex?

These are just a few examples of how we can end up somewhere we don’t want to go by not taking God seriously with regard to the goodness of creation. In the next few installments of this “Double Takes” series, we will take a closer look at some other examples.

For now, however, maybe it’s enough just to hear God asking, “How many times do I have to tell you…?”

Don’t answer that, or you’ll be in even more trouble.

Ponder: Have you ever been taught that the body is bad and the spirit is good? How is that working for you?

Pray: For the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies, for the love which from our birth over and around us lies; Lord of all, to thee we raise, this our hymn of grateful praise.

From the hymn, “For the Beauty of the Earth”; text by Folliott S. Pierpoint (1835-1917).

Read: Acts 8:26-39

Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it” (Acts 8:27-29, NRSV).

“Do you understand what you are reading?”

That was the question Philip posed to the stranger. For some time now, I have wondered the same thing.

When Christians discuss the subject of homosexuality, we tend to obsess about a small set of Scripture passages. What would happen if we expanded the discussion to include some other stories? Stories that may—on closer examination—offer relevant wisdom?

One of these is the story of the Ethiopian eunuch. Scripture does not give us his name, but tradition identifies him as Simeon Bachos. Since identity is much more than nationality or sexuality, let’s agree to call him by his name.

What do we know about Simeon Bachos? We know he is from Ethiopia. We know that he is a person of some power and significant responsibility. The Queen of Ethiopia has entrusted him with her entire treasury, after all. Although Jewish law would have barred him from becoming a proselyte (see Deut. 23:1), we know that he is at least deeply curious about the Jewish religion. He has just come from worshiping in Jerusalem, and when Philip finds him sitting in his chariot by the side of the road, he is reading the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Even if the Jewish faith did not accept him, he seems to have accepted Jewish faith.

But what does it mean when it says that he is a “eunuch”? In short, it means that he has been castrated. This brutal practice was common in ancient Near Eastern and North African courts. Among other things, it ensured that the victim was “safe” with the women of the court. Whether it was inflicted as a punishment or a condition of employment (or both), we can be fairly certain it was not voluntary.

Are you beginning to sense why this story may be relevant to Christian discussions about all things LGBTQIA?

The overwhelming scientific consensus tells us that sexual orientation is not a choice. It is not voluntary. And yet, so many Christians keep insisting on having these conversations in the category of “sin.”

What, I wonder, would Simeon Bachos have to say to us in light of his experience?

He might tell us what it feels like to be treated as an outsider. He might bear witness to the pain of wanting to be part of a community of faith that wants no part of you.

But he might also tell us about the day he was sitting in his chariot reading Isaiah 53. He’d been trying to puzzle out who this Suffering Servant was—this person who “was despised and rejected by others” and who was taken away “by a perversion of justice.” Whoever this Suffering Servant was, Simeon Bachos wanted to meet him. They’d have a lot to talk about.

Maybe he’d tell us about Philip showing up out of nowhere to explain about Jesus. How Simeon Bachos had blurted out, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” How, to his surprise, Philip hadn’t raised a single objection. How they had simply jumped down from the chariot, walked over to the water, and gotten the job done. How in that moment Simeon Bachos had felt like he finally belonged.

We can’t be sure exactly what Simeon Bachos would say to us, of course. But I’m pretty sure that, at the very least, he would look us in the eye and ask, “Do you understand what you are reading?”

Ponder: In the beginning of this story, it is God (via an angel) who gives Philip his marching orders. What do you think God is telling the church to do today? What is God telling you to do?

Listen: For a wonderful exploration of this passage, listen to this sermon by Gordon Wiersma, preached on May 2, 2021 at Hope Church in Holland, Michigan. (The sermon starts at minute 33:40.) If you would rather read the sermon, here is a link to the text.

Pray: Help us to understand what we are reading, gracious God. Help us to be open to all the wisdom you have for us—whether through Scripture, or science, or those with stories to tell.

Read: Numbers 27:1-11

Then the daughters of Zelophehad came forward. The names of his daughters were: Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. They stood before Moses, Eleazar the priest, the leaders, and all the congregation, at the entrance of the tent of meeting, and they said, “Our father died in the wilderness…and he had no sons. Why should the name of our father be taken away from his clan because he had no son? Give to us a possession among our father’s brothers (Numbers 27:1-4, selected portions, NRSV).

If you’re a fan of “God said it; I believe it; that settles it,” then you may not want to read Numbers 27 too closely. It has the potential to upend some assumptions.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

This obscure passage from the book of Numbers may seem like a strange place to start a series called, “Double Takes.” After all, most people probably haven’t looked at this story once, let alone twice. But since this story is about double takes, it seems like an especially good place to begin.

The first people who do a double take in this story are the five daughters of Zelophehad. We even know their names: Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. If we are regular readers of the Bible, our antennae are up from the get-go, since the Bible does not always bother to record women’s names, let alone their perspectives. But the perspective of this sister act gets the story off the ground. It’s what gives them the courage to come forward.

The daughters of Zelophehad had a problem. Every Hebrew family was supposed to inherit a piece of the Promised Land. But since only boys could inherit, and their father had died with “only” daughters, they were out of luck.

One can only imagine the conversations they must have had around the dinner table. They knew the letter of the law, but what about the spirit of the law? There must have been a moment when they looked at one another and knew what they had to do. The fact that it wasn’t the “done thing” does not seem to have occurred to them.

To make a short story shorter, they bring their case to Moses and the other movers and shakers. It must have caused quite a stir. (The Bible bothers to tell us about it, after all.) Moses is flummoxed, so he takes their case to a higher authority. And then, even God does a double take.

“The daughters of Zelophehad are right,” God admits. “You shall indeed let them possess an inheritance among their father’s brothers and pass the inheritance of their father on to them. You shall also say to the Israelites, “If a man dies, and has no son, then you shall pass his inheritance on to his daughter” (vv. 7-8).

The fascinating thing about this divine double take is what it says about the need to interpret for new situations. God’s word is not static. It must be interpreted anew in each generation. In this story, even God reconsiders, and Moses the law-giver must become the law-interpreter.

This is bad news if your preferred method of mounting an argument is to quote Scripture as if it were carved in stone. That approach is too easy, too lazy, and too arrogant. No, the hard work of interpretation means we’re going to have to consider the spirit as well as the letter of the law. Jesus, if you recall, had some things to say on that subject.

In the next several installments of this series, we’re going to take a second look at some parts of the Bible that may not be as “settled” as we have assumed. It will be hard work. It may require you to re-think some cherished assumptions. But if you are worried, just remember Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. They had the courage to come forward. I hope you will, too.

Ponder: What Bible passages do you think need a double take? What’s to stop us from reading whatever we want into the Bible?

Pray: Help us to interpret your Word with humility, openness, intelligence, and courage.

Double Takes Series

Sometimes the Bible doesn’t say what we think it says.

In this series we will take a second look at some passages that are often misunderstood. While I can’t promise that these “double takes” will change the way you see the world, they may well change the way you see certain parts of the Bible.

In all candor, you may not experience these new perspectives as improvements. Sometimes it’s easier to keep thinking what we’ve always thought. But for me, it has been a blessing to reconsider my assumptions. I am reminded of something Barbara Brown Taylor once said about being dis-illusioned: “Disillusionment is the loss of illusion—about ourselves, about the world, about God—and while it is almost always painful, it is not a bad thing to lose the lies we have mistaken for the the truth.”*

May God grant you the courage to take a second look and the wisdom to know how to respond to what you see.

Carol M. Bechtel

*Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1993), p. 8.