The Ladder
Strange, that as I drove to the ultrasound for our second child, I received news that my ninety-two-year-old grandmother would begin hospice care. As I sat in a hospital room with my wife, watching life thrive and flicker in shades of black, white, and grey, I couldn’t help but notice that the baby’s heart, now beating behind the fragile walls of a four-month-old’s chest, resembled a small bird, fluttering in the dark. This, while the wings of a woman’s heart nine decades old were coming to a standstill. One flutters into the present; another settles into eternity.
Verna May Hibbs was my last living grandparent. She buried her firstborn son, my father, over a decade ago—and a few years before that she picked a plot at the graveyard for her husband. The last of a generation has gone down to the earth.
Some months ago, when she was still living, I thought of her as I read Genesis 28:10–13:
10 Jacob left Beersheba and went toward Haran. 11 And he came to a certain place and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep. 12 And he dreamed, and behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! 13
Divine dignitaries climbing up and down a ladder in the sky—now there’s a dream worth dreaming! I find it striking that immediately after Jacob awakes, the Lord identifies himself as the God of his fathers, Abraham and Isaac, and then reminds him of the covenant promise. Abraham had already laid down in the earth, and so had Isaac, and yet God introduces himself with their names. Why? To confirm that he would do what he said he would do? Certainly, but I think there is more to it, especially when we consider Jesus’ words to the Sadducees in Mark’s gospel.
Jesus, if you remember, rebuked the Sadducees for quibbling over post-resurrection marital rights (Mark 12:18–27). Which of the seven men would be the widow’s husband at the resurrection if they had each been married to her? Their question came not out of legitimate curiosity but out of intellectual snobbery. “How can there be a resurrection from the dead,” they reasoned, “if we can’t even pair a woman with her earthly husband?” Resurrection was a dream, not a doctrine. Or so they thought.
But Jesus’s rebuke is swift and sharp.
“Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God? 25 For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. 26 And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? 27 He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong” (Mark 12:24–27).
Notice here that the Father’s identification of himself in Jacob’s dream (Gen 28:13) mirrors the Son’s testimony of the Father in reality. And, as Jesus says, this is not the God of the dead. This is the God who gives life, the one in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), and with whom we are united long before our bodies break down after burial (John 17:21–24). In other words, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are alive with the living God. They have union with the very Lord of creation. The last thing that comes into play here is who their spouses will be in the resurrection! The fact that the Sadducees are stuck on this betrays their fixation with temporal tradition, rather than their love for the living God. And so Jesus’ criticism rings true: these men know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. The Scriptures, after all, speak plainly about the mysterious truth that not all those who die are, in fact, dead—at least not in any ultimate sense. And it is the very power of God that makes this possible, for only God “gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not” (Rom 4:17 niv). Life after death is not a dream. And the resurrection is not about marital arrangements; it is about uninterrupted communion with the Trinity.
So, let’s go back to Jacob dreaming of a heavenly ladder. This Jacob, whom Christ references centuries later, sees through his eyelids that God is the one who controls the going and coming in his own kingdom. He stands above an angel-ridden ladder, naming himself and assuring Jacob, along with the rest of us, not only that his covenantal promise is immovable, but that the God in whom we trust is the God of the living, the I am (Exod 3:14). And the Son of God is not only the great gate to the Father (John 10:9); he is the resurrection and the life (John 11:25; 14:6), the one who gives us the Spirit of life (Rom 8:2, 10, 11; 2 Cor 3:6). I cannot help but think that this glorious mystery is in the background of Jacob’s dream. The heavenly ladder full of angelic hosts is but a shadow of the work of the heavenly Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in calling us back to himself. And we cling not to rungs of a celestial ladder, but to the person of Christ himself.
The point in all of this is that there seems to be more to the story of Jacob’s ladder than a reaffirmation of the covenant. There is a testament to the living God who controls all coming and going, and all that passes from life to death . . . and back to life.
This should be a great source of comfort for us in the present. It certainly is for me as I think back on my grandmother’s funeral. As I stood beneath a red tent on a windy Saturday afternoon, just footsteps away from the grave of my father, I was standing in the presence of the God of the living (Mark 12:27), the God of my father.
I could not see this truth at the moment. On that day, I was caught up in the haze of mourning. But there was at least one other person at the funeral who could see it, I think. A young boy named Aaron, blind and crippled by cerebral palsy, sat in the front row of metal chairs at the burial plot. He had only met my grandmother once, accompanying the pastor to her care facility a few weeks before her death, but he wanted to make sure he was at the funeral. Why? Honestly . . . I don’t know. It is beyond me. But I can tell you this: he seemed to have a far keener sense than I did that the God of life is the one who controls all coming and going. And when someone goes, when someone leaves behind the temporary for the eternal, life-giving God, that is no small event. So you show up. You show up and you pray for those whose souls are still weighted and waiting in the present.
