Text: Luke 20:27-40
Speaker: Joel Miller
27 Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him 28 and asked him a question: “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies leaving a wife but no children, the man[a] shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman and died childless; 30 then the second[b] 31 and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. 32 Finally the woman also died. 33 In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”
34 Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, 35 but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. 36 Indeed, they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. 37 And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. 38 Now he is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.” 39 Then some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” 40 For they no longer dared to ask him another question.
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There’s a piece of legislation in the book of Deuteronomy called the law of levirate marriage. How’s that for a thrilling opening line? The law addressed a need and a problem. The need was for the survival of a people, which required having children. More specifically, in a patriarchal society, a man passed on his name and family line through his sons. The problem was mortality. Specifically, what if a married man died before having sons? For this, there was the law of levirate marriage. According this law, it was the duty of the dead man’s brother to marry the childless widow. The firstborn son they produce together would not be his, but would be the legal offspring of the deceased brother. By doing this, the surviving brother would redeem his dead brother’s lineage, and keep his name alive in Israel. That was the point of the law.
The sermon title, “All of them are alive,” is the last thing Jesus says in a conversation with the Sadducees during which they reference this law. This is the only time in Luke’s gospel when the Sadducees talk with Jesus. Just this once. They want to talk about resurrection – which they don’t believe in. And in case that wasn’t deep enough, for good measure they mix in the politics of marriage, sex, and biblical interpretation. Take a sip of that cocktail, and you’ve got to admire the Sadducees for making the most of their one shot with Jesus. In the memory of the earliest Jesus followers, this must have been an important exchange. It’s one of the few stories recorded in almost the exact same form, in the same narrative location, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
For us, it’s a strange passage. Part of its strangeness is that odd mix of earthly and other-worldly topics. It addresses something most of us probably wouldn’t mind having a little more clarity on – resurrection. But the specific cultural marriage practices of the ancient near east come across as distant and, strange. The effect for us can be one of disappointment.
Here we have Jesus himself being asked a question about resurrection – something he rarely talked about, by the way. This is not the apostles trying to make sense of the resurrection of Jesus. This is Jesus, before all that, giving his own perspective on what resurrection is or isn’t about. It’s right here. But the question from the Sadducees isn’t at all the kind of question we would ask. After that final phrase out of Jesus’ mouth, “all of them are alive,” Luke writes: “They no longer dared to ask him another question.” And we’re left feeling the opposite. I have a lot of questions. What just happened?
Aside from not believing in resurrection, we don’t know a whole lot about the Sadducees, but we do know a little. They were associated with the political elite and had close ties to the Jerusalem temple. This exchange with Jesus takes place in the temple, so it’s the Sadducees home turf. Another thing is they believed that only the Torah, the books of Moses, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures were authoritative: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And that’s about what we know. When the Jerusalem temple was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, the Sadducees pretty much drop off the map and have little to no influence in what became rabbinic Judaism in the centuries that followed. Ironically, this group challenging Jesus about resurrection from the dead will soon come to their own historical dead end. Their connections with the temple establishment and their view of scripture is enough to know this was a staunchly conservative group, with interest in maintaining the status quo. This also fits well into their beliefs about resurrection because one of the things with resurrection is that it seriously messes with the status quo.
The Sadducees believed only in the Torah and because those books have nothing to say about resurrection, they didn’t believe in it. It wasn’t in their Bible. But a lot had happened with the people of Israel since the time of Moses. They had mixed and mingled with Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks. They had assimilated some of the philosophies of these other cultures and expanded their own scriptures to include words of the prophets, Psalms, Wisdom literature. The idea of resurrection doesn’t show up until late in Jewish thought. The book of Daniel, one of the last books of the Old Testament to be written, was forged out of the encounters with those other cultures. It gives one of the most explicit references to resurrection. In the final chapter of Daniel it says: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky.” It’s not entirely clear what’s envisioned here, but we can begin to see the early outlines of a belief in a resurrection of the body and a rewarding of the just. This was a theological innovation that would have been deeply comforting to a persecuted people for whom life in this world was anything but just. By Jesus’ time the belief was mainstream.
But the Sadducees object, and they reach back into their scriptures, to present a case to Jesus to show the utter absurdity of resurrection. Specifically, the law of levirate marriage in Deuteronomy. They present an extreme, but hypothetically possible, case to Jesus in which a woman ends up getting married to seven brothers, all of whom die. None of whom father any children. Finally this woman dies, and the Sadducees have their punchline: “In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For seven had married her.” Whatever their motivations – political, theological, even if they genuinely wanted to know how this could all work – the scenario has the effect of making bodily resurrection sound ridiculous – or at least an administrative nightmare.
A present day question about resurrection that would have a similar kind of effect might sound something like this:
We now know that the lining of the human stomach replaces itself every three-five days, the liver every two months, and we have a whole new outer layer of skin every month. Every minute about a billion cells in the body die, replaced with new cells. In one year’s time approximately 98% of the atoms in each human body are replaced with others. These atoms were created inside the cores of stars billions of years ago and ever since have been cycling through gas and rock, bacteria and soil, species long extinct and those still among us today, including, you and me. We will one day be in the ground, but these atoms that have composed our bodies will continue to compose countless other bodies. Now, in the resurrection, therefore, whose atoms will be whose, since they belonged to everyone?
What Jesus doesn’t do is attempt to sort out who and what belongs to who. As usual, rather than answer the question directly, he presents an entirely different framework out of which to consider the matter at hand.
What he does do is challenge marriage and having children as central to the purpose of existence, perhaps challenging the whole arrangement of patriarchal society. In resurrection life, Jesus says, not only do people not belong to death, they do not belong to each other, nor do they need to create offspring in order to overcome the forces of death. They are, as Jesus, says, children of God.
For the Sadducees this woman, unsuccessful in her most important duty, having children, is passed down from one brother to the next. Their question is “To whom does she really belong?”
For Jesus, the woman does not need a husband to escort her into resurrection life. She doesn’t need to have a child to validate her worth. And she belongs not to any of these men, but to God.
Resurrection is not a resuscitation of a previous order. It is a living out of an entirely different order in which we are all children of God. The New Testament goes on to say this is something that can already be happening right now, in this current life.
What if we lived resurrection right now? It would likely shake up the world the Sadducees and we are so anxious to preserve.
That’s part one of Jesus’ response. But there’s more! Picking up in verse 37.
What Jesus doesn’t do is attempt to convince the Sadducees that they have too narrow a view of Scripture. He does not reference the prophets or Psalms. He does not quote Daniel. He doesn’t say they should really consider opening their minds to Greek philosophy.
Instead, he suggests that all they need to know about resurrection is already right there in front of their eyes. To affirm what he wants to say about resurrection, Jesus quotes from their small, five book Bible. Specifically, in Exodus.
It’s a crazy piece of interpretation Jesus pulls off, but well within the scope of rabbinic creative license.
What’s crazy about it, is that to support resurrection, Jesus names three guys who are extremely dead. This is what Jesus says: “And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story of the burning bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” That’s the verse Jesus uses to illuminate his view of resurrection. Everyone knew that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were long dead, very dead, buried, gone, dead. Jesus’ creative reasoning goes something like this: God is the God of Abraham, God is the God not of the dead but of the living, therefore Abraham, and all of them, are alive in God. Therefore resurrection. If you accept the first two as true, which Jesus’ audience certainly did, the next follows.
Speaking from a strictly logical perspective, it’s not an entirely satisfying answer. Few of us are willing to accept as a basis for our faith biblical proof text + creative twist = theological fact.
But there’s something about that final phrase, “to God, all of them are alive,” that bursts outside the boundaries of cold logic.
Our only way of understanding life is in contrast to death. That which is living is that which is not yet dead. We depend on death to give life context and meaning.
What Jesus might be asking his listeners to do is to let go of our ways of defining life that are helplessly intertwined with the reality of death, and to entrust ourselves to a reality which exists without any reference to death at all. Is this even possible? The Divine is sheer aliveness, thriving outside our own small experience of death, holding everything in being and a continual Source of life leading to life. “To God, all of them are alive.”
What kind of world is it in which old Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, Rebekah and Isaac, Rachel and Jacob are utterly and profoundly alive? What kind of world is it in which Jonah and Job, Esther and Ruth, Peter and Paul, St. Francis and Clare, the early Anabaptists, our mothers and fathers in the faith are all living in God? Confucius, Socrates, and Rumi right there with them. And not just the heros, but the millions of unnamed anonymous participants in history, the childless woman of seven marriages, also among the living?
This passage most likely does not leave us in the same state that it left the crowds around Jesus. “For they no longer dared to ask him another question.” Hopefully it does just the opposite. “For it stirred in them a hundred new questions.”
Resurrection is a great mystery. Being alive is a great mystery. What it means to us will hopefully continue to evolve and grow over time. There is space for questions and unknowing, belief and unbelief.
What we do believe, as a church, on this side of death, is that although the historical person of Jesus no longer walks among us, that we, through the grace of God, are the body of Christ. Resurrection happens among us. Christ is not merely a ghost, an idea, a lingering dream, but Christ has a body, and we are that body. We are the organized, energized, recycled atoms of Christ’s continuing life. We are animated by the same Spirit. Marriage or no marriage, children or no children, we belong to Life. In God, all are alive.