Our reading today is Luke, chapter 20, verses 27-38. It should not stop there so I’ll tell you the next two verses: “Some of the teachers of the law responded, “Well said, teacher!” And no one dared to ask him any more questions.” Boom! Mic drop.
Jesus shut up those Sadducees! See, they are asking him ‘gotcha’ questions. (I’m sorry, I know we’ve all been hearing that phrase too much.) The difference is these are REAL gotcha questions. They’ve been grilling him in the temple, trying to trip him up. He is nearing the end of his ministry and will soon be killed for his preaching and beliefs. But Jesus is God. He’s not going to be trapped by any silly gotcha question.
What do we know about the Sadducees and why does Luke include them in his gospel? Well, they are the head guys at the temple. They hold as holy only the first five books of the Torah, the Pentateuch. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The Pharisees include the books of the prophets and the psalms in their holy library. As the first five books don’t mention resurrection, the Sadducees don’t believe in it.
So, they propose a ridiculous scenario to Jesus of a poor woman marrying 7 brothers, one after the other. This is levirate marriage, a patriarchal institution that protected women by passing them from brother to brother. The spirit behind this is good, keeping women from becoming powerless and penniless widows, but this scenario is kind of gross. The Sadducees want to know, after marrying seven brothers, whose wife the woman will be in the resurrection.
Jesus answers that marriage is of this secular age and in the spiritual world of resurrection there will be nothing so mundane. I feel like Jesus tries to make this point repeatedly. When people want him to be their earthly king, he reminds them that he is not of this world. When Peter doesn’t want to hear about the physical suffering Jesus is about to endure, Jesus turns to Peter and shouts: “Get behind me, Satan! You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.” Jesus continually urges us to move up to a heavenly plane, a place where our petty earthly concerns no longer exist.
He tries to explain just this point when he reveals that people don’t die or get married in the resurrection because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. Thus, their scenario of wondering which brother will be married to the widow in the resurrection doesn’t make sense.
Jesus is one smart cookie. He continues his argument by quoting from Exodus, one of the books the Sadducees revere. He talks about Moses encountering God in the burning bush. Now listen carefully as Jesus gets quite semantic on us. Jesus points out that this passage declares that God IS – present tense- the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not that God WAS their God. Therefore, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob must in some sense be still alive. Hence, the necessity of resurrection.
“And no one dared to ask him any more questions.” Mic drop. Jesus got the last word.
I bet if I asked each of you to tell me how you envision the resurrection, I would get many different answers. Here’s my take: I went through a decade, from 1984 to 1994, where I lost way too many loved ones, from my mother to my late husband, including dear friends and most of my aunts and uncles. Lots and lots of death. During that decade, I spent a great deal of time wondering about what came next. I really wrestled with my beliefs, my faith, my logical mind.
Here’s where I landed: I realized that I was quite secular, that I pretty much thought that upon death, we simply stop. I liked the idea that one lived on in the memory’s others held, hopefully good memories. BUT I also found that the idea of seeing my loved ones again somehow, on some plane, was deeply comforting to me. So, I decided that since no one knows for sure what happens after death, I could allow myself to be both secular and sacred in my understanding. I don’t know if that is a cop-out, but it worked for me.
My faith has changed. The main thing I have learned over the years is that we make God too small. We picture heaven as a cloudy place with angels flying around. We squeeze God into a tiny box, maybe we imagine a white-haired old guy above us, smiling benevolently.
We forget that God is omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. All present, all powerful, and all knowing. God is BIG. We can’t understand God, just as we can’t understand resurrection because our minds are not capable of this understanding.
I think that is the point Jesus is trying to make today with the Sadducees. They have made God too small, worrying about marriage after death, proposing silly, secular scenarios to try to trip up the living God who is standing right in front of them. We must be on guard against doing the same thing. We mustn’t squeeze God into a small box so that we can understand God. God can’t be understood.
Those Sadducees had God, the living God, standing right before them but they couldn’t see. What would you do if you had God right in front of you? I would fall down and say thank you. Well, God IS here right now. Really, all we can do is open our minds, open our hearts to the hugeness, the blessing that is God in our midst.