By Kristin Berkey-Abbott
Luke 20:27-38
Finally, a Gospel that mentions the afterlife! Of course, it’s a bit late—All Saints Sunday was last week. But some of you might be saying, “Oh, good, at last we’ve got a chance to see what Jesus has to tell us about Heaven.”
Others of us might be back at that first sentence of the Gospel. Sadducees don’t believe in the Resurrection? No life after death? Are these the religious leaders who are in charge? And they don’t believe in a fundamental of the faith?
A brief historical note: Yes, they were in charge of much Temple practice, including the taking of the money and the paying of the taxes that Rome required. Yes, most members of priestly ruling class were Sadducees.
Do we know for sure what they believed? Is there a Book of the Sadducees? No.
But leaving that aside, the set up is even stranger than it seems at first. There’s the obvious question: if they don’t believe in the Resurrection, then why pose this question to Jesus, this question about who will be married to who in Heaven?
Here, too, we don’t really know. What we do know is that the Sadducees are working with others to test or trick Jesus. We’ve had story after story of people testing Jesus. More commonly, it’s Pharisees who offer Jesus a question that will damn him, no matter which way he answers. Now the Sadducees get their turn.
We could also criticize the Sadducees for asking a question that’s no longer important. Let’s make no mistake: the set up of the question, the childless widow who loses her husband and then has to marry brother after brother after brother in hopes of a child, this practice is Jewish law in the time of Moses. In the time of Jesus, people had rejected this ancient practice designed to protect inheritance and blood lines. Many of us think of Jesus as moving in cities that weren’t cosmopolitan. But even in the small fishing towns and outposts where Jesus traveled occasionally, the practice of widows marrying their brothers-in-law was not practiced, and frankly, would have been seen as a bit barbaric. Centuries of law and practice by conquering empires gave people a much more modern view of marriage, something closer to what we practice in the 21st century than in the time of Moses.
So why ask this question?
I take a kinder approach to the motives of the questioner, whether it be Roman, or Pharisee, or Sadducee. I think that Jesus truly baffles people, then and now. People pose questions hoping that they can figure out who Jesus is by the response that he gives. The questions might tell us more about the questioner than the answers tell us about Jesus.
As is so often the case, Jesus gives a response that could leave the questioner even more confused. In Jesus’ answer to the Sadducees, we see a familiar dynamic. Jesus knows that the Sadducees don’t really care about the answer to the question that they’ve asked. The Sadducees don’t believe that there is life after death. For the Sadducees, the answer to their riddle wouldn’t be a mystery: the woman and all the brothers would be dead, and there would be no reunion in the Resurrection. Why do they bother Jesus with this question?
Perhaps Jesus wonders the same thing, but as all good teachers do, he uses this moment as a wider teaching opportunity. As he so often does, Jesus answers the question that he wishes people might ask. He reminds the audience—and us—that so many of us ask the wrong question.
There’s another nuance to today’s Gospel that may be lost to us across the centuries. The Sadducees are no longer in power by the time the Gospel of Luke was written. No one is in power in terms of the Temple because there is no Temple. The Romans have crushed Jewish uprisings in the decade of the 70’s and destroyed the Temple, which they saw as the place that nurtured anti-Roman radicals. Here, as in other parts of Luke, we can almost hear the Gospel writer saying, “You’re arguing about trivial matters while the forces of the Roman empire are about to crush you. WAKE UP!”
It's tempting to feel we’re better than those ancient cultures, the ones who didn’t recognize the Messiah, even when he lived among them. But here, too, we find out that we have more in common with the Sadducees than we first suspected. We, too, are much more interested in questions that are rooted in a culture of death than in the new kingdom of life that Jesus calls us to live.
We, too, live in a culture of death. A quick look at the television, even when it’s not campaign season, reminds us that we are so often asking the wrong questions, thinking about riddles that don’t matter. We see it in our politics, we see it in our schools, we see it in our grocery stores. We even see it in churches where we might expect a community to be wrestling with the essential questions of life. Instead so many congregations spend time wrangling over issues of morality that will seem incomprehensible to future generations. We could spend some time thinking about which riddles of our day will seem like the question of widows marrying their brothers-in-law in centuries to come.
Jesus spends much of his ministry declaring that God has created humanity to be so much more than our culture expects us to be. Jesus sees us, names us, claims us-- as God has done for the earliest patriarchs, through the time of the Sadducees, right on through to our time. We are children of the resurrection. Resurrection culture is the one that matters.
It's a question worth asking then, and it’s a question worth asking now. What dead issues consume us? What cultures of death keep us distracted from the work Jesus calls us to do?
God invites us to move away from the culture of death in which we find ourselves, whether that’s the culture of death that is legalistic posturings and entrapment or the culture of death that is shaming and casting out those who are different or the culture of death that comes from endless worry, worry rooted our scarcity consciousness that tells us we can never have enough or do enough.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks this question: what gives us life and what keeps us connected to death? He asks it in a round about way, but that’s the question at the heart of today’s Gospel. In this time of creation getting ready for the season of hibernation, let us reflect on it again. What do we need to let go of, to let die? What is giving us life? What lies dormant, waiting for the Spring season of our time and attention? Let us resolve to ignore the forces that want to keep us buried in the grave. Let us commit ourselves to our Triune God, who has the power to transform life out of all the powers of death.
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