Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The text is the Gospel reading from Luke 20.
If
you’re not careful, you can let a lot of things get in the way of the message
of Jesus.
You’ve
had questions like this before, I suspect. Someone comes up to you and asks a
rather innocent and fun question: “God is all-powerful, right?” You wisely and
correctly nod your head. “So, He can do anything, right?” Your nose twitches a
little bit, suggesting that this conversation is starting to take a turn.
Still, it seems rather innocuous, so you agree: Yes, God can do anything. A
greasy smile spreads across the face of the suddenly not-so-innocent
questioner: “So, if God is all powerful and He can do anything, can He make a
rock so big He cannot lift it?” It's a classic misdirect, trying to draw you
into the argument about the perceived inconsistency of God.
The
basic problem is the premise itself is incorrect. There are some things God
cannot do. For example, He cannot lie. He cannot do unholy things. He cannot be
unholy. He cannot be unfaithful to His promises.
But,
if you want a simple answer to the question, it’s this: God does not waste time
or energy on such foolish things as appeasing the simple minds of men filled
with idle curiosity.
The
Sadducees were coming to Jesus with such a trivial question. It seems the
question is about marriage. A brother married a woman and died. According to
Deuteronomy 25:5, if a man dies before he has a son, it is the responsibility
of his brother to marry the woman. It was called “Levitical marriage,” the idea
being that the brother acts as a surrogate husband, sort of, to sire a son so that there will
be an heir to carry on his brother’s name, “so his name shall not be blotted
out of Isarel,” Moses wrote (v. 6). They take this Law and create an unlikely
scenario: a man dies without leaving a son. Each of his six brothers, then,
marries the widow, all who die. So, whose husband will she be in the
resurrection - # 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7? It sounds like a question about marriage
and relationships after death – ridiculous, to be sure, but it does present an
interesting ethical question, doesn’t it, almost as interesting as who she
should be buried next to when she dies?
You
notice, I said “it seems the question is about marriage.” The Sadducees
are doing a misdirect. It wasn’t about marriage at all. It was about
resurrection. For the Sadducees, the discussion about the resurrection –
specifically whether there would be such a thing or not – was a core value. By
way of explanation, the Sadducees and the Pharisees were the two political
parties in the Jewish faith at the time of Jesus. The Pharisees were more
theologians; they held that the entire Scripture (the Law, the Prophets and the
Writings) was God’s Word, that angels existed, and that there would be a
resurrection some day. The Sadducees were more political; they only held the
Torah, the first five book of the Old Testament were God’s Word, and they
denied anything spiritual, including the resurrection. That last point is key:
they denied the resurrection. (This is a terrible play on their name, but if
you need a way to keep them separate, just remember that because the Sadducees
denied the resurrection, they were “sad you see.”). So the question about
marriage after the resurrection was misdirect: they wanted to corner Jesus
about life-after-death, not which “I do” counts more.
Jesus,
of course, knows exactly what they are wanting to do. Jesus doesn’t waste time
with foolishness. He cuts to the heart, the issue behind the façade. Marriage
in this lifetime is an image of Christ and His bride the church, but it is a
relationship for this lifetime. We even say it in the marriage rite: “Til death
do us part.” Unless Jesus returns first, marriage begins with “I do,” and it
ends with the last breath of the dying spouse. Marriage is God’s gift, the
building block of society, the foundation of the home and family, the closest
and most intimate of all relationships in this lifetime. But, in the
resurrection, Jesus says, they “neither marry nor are given in marriage.”
Jesus
does say, “they [that is, the faithful who die] are like the angels,” and I
suspect that causes a lot of confusion. Jesus doesn’t mean we become angels.
Angels are a different part of creation. People are people – even in the
resurrection – and angels are angels. Just as apple trees do not become frogs,
people do not become angels when we die. What Jesus means is that, like the
angels, we rise never to die again. Don’t get worked up about the angel part.
Know this: we will rise so that our whole life now, with all its toils and
troubles will somehow be raised up and re-created, if you will, in Christ.
So,
here’s what that means for that poor woman in the Sadducees story: because God is
in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, making good out of all things in
the death of His Son, then that poor hypothetical woman with her seven
hypothetical brothers for husbands will rise up on resurrection morning to a
whole real, actual, factual life worked out for actual good by the real,
actual, factual cross and death of Jesus that reconciles all things to God. And
the hypothetical question of “Whose wife will she be” will be becomes one, big
non-starter in the marriage supper of the Lamb in His kingdom where the only
marriage that counts is the marriage of Christ and His Church.
Remember,
the Sadducees only trust the Torah, so Jesus goes back to the work of Moses.
You heard it in this morning’s Old Testament lesson. Moses records God saying
that He is “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Present tense reality – not past tense. Its
as if God is saying, I am the God of the living, not the dead. Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob – they are as alive to me as I am to them.
Why
is this so important to us, to the church militant, in the year 2025? Why is
this debate between Jesus and the Sadducees over resurrection and marriage
worth talking about, worth you listening to, this Sunday morning?
The
resurrection is never mere hollow discussion, a mere curiosity, a topic of
scholarly debate, and a one-off phrase that we solemnly murmur each week about
“the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” Likewise, it’s not
just a future event. The resurrection is our very livelihood right now. You are
already raised in Christ in your baptism. Your old Adam and old Eve drowned,
dying with Christ; your new Adam and new Eve were raised with Christ. You are
already raised. That means everything you are now and everything you will be,
where you are now and where you will be are all connected to Christ’s death and
resurrection.
I
know…we have questions about what the resurrection will be like. Truthfully,
most of the answers we do not know yet. We wonder about things like what will
our bodies be like, what will our “lives” be like, what age will we be, what we
be like? Will we know our loved ones, and if so, how? Long-married and
newlyweds share the same question: what about my husband, what about my wife?
Parents want to know about their children. Even the language about “new heavens
and new earth” raises questions. Without
being flippant, the answers to those questions are important to us but they are
questions of curiosity. Ask them, play with them a little bit, but don’t obsess
over them. You’ll know soon enough – and you’ll know firsthand. Until then, you
have work to do in your vocation as husband and wife, mother and father, son
and daughter, neighbor and child of God. In that vocation, you are guided by
who you are, the resurrected people of God. As such, you know this: sin, death
and the grave are already conquered, but this side of heaven, this side of the
eternal resurrection, death remains the great enemy of this life. The
resurrection, that great day when Jesus returns bringing the complete
consummation of Easter, the resurrection will be the death of death.
And,
in what sounds to be like a game of words, that end will actually be the
beginning of the beginning. Christ is the firstfruits, remember, and we follow
after Him. His resurrection becomes ours. It is the prelude to the eternal
fullness and joy of the full presence of the Lamb and God who sits on the
throne.
If
the Sadducees had believed Jesus, they wouldn’t have looked for ways to trap
him in his own words and ensnare him with hypothetical questions about some
fictitious women married to seven brothers. Instead, they would have asked how
they might be found worthy to attain the age to come and the resurrection of
the righteous. They might have repented of their actual lives that fell far
short of the glory of God rather than construct hypothetical lives to see what
Jesus would say.
If
anyone is in Christ, and you are in Christ through baptismal faith, you are
already a new creation. The old has gone, as far as God and faith are
concerned. The new has already come. Now you are a new creature in Christ. Soon
you will be a new creature in yourself, with a body fit for eternity, as surely
as Jesus is risen from the dead and lives and reigns to all eternity.
In
the end, there will be no questions, hypothetical or otherwise. Only Amens and
Alleluias.
In
the name of Jesus,
Amen
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