In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus is being tested in the Temple. It is Holy Week, the last week of His earthly life before the Cross and empty Tomb. He has come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, as has been His custom for His whole life long. But things come now to a head. After more than three years of preaching, teaching, healing the sick, and raising the dead, His ministry has made quite an impact. Many wonder openly if Jesus is the Christ. He nearly starts a riot just by riding through the city gate.

And in these few days between His triumphal entry and His arrest, Jesus teaches in the Temple, which His people, the Jewish people, hold to be the House of God on earth. During this time, several groups engage Him in debate, hoping to discredit Him before the masses; or better yet to trap Him in some self-incrimination, such that He could be dealt with by the authorities, before those who hail Him as a king can foment their rebellion.

Judea was important to the Romans. It sat as a hinge between the great provinces of Syria and Egypt, bordering the Parthian Empire, Rome’s great rivals to the east. There were lots of Jews in Parthia, and lots of Jews in Rome, so Judea might swing either way. Jerusalem, then, was a hotbed of contesting interests, conflicting groups. Chief among these were the Sadducees, the priestly élite, claiming descent from the High Priest Zadok who served under King David a thousand years before.

Under the Persian Empire, Parthian precursors, the Sadducees had held positions of power as emissaries, functionaries, between the Judean people and their imperial overlords. In Jesus’ day, Sadducees proved themselves generally pro-Roman, not because they particularly appreciated the pagans, but because they sought stability, to preserve the status quo. Typically the wealthy lean conservative. This led other groups of Judeans to view them as traitors, bootlickers, and to denounce the Temple establishment as irredeemably corrupt.

Just how traditionalist the Sadducees were remains a matter of some debate. The later accusation that they recognized only the first five books of the Bible seems unlikely, even if they held the Law of Moses alone as strictly canonical, strictly scriptural. What matters for us today is that they did not believe in resurrection, nor in any sort of spiritual state between death and restoration. For them, dead was dead. The prophetic hope of life after death appeared to them absurd.

“I mean, how would that work?” they wanted to know. What were the mechanics of resurrection? How does someone gain a new body, or have their old one restored, after they have festered in the tomb? Does one still have to eat, to procreate, to use the toilet? So this is how they put it to Jesus:

“Teacher,” they say, “Moses wrote that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, then the man should marry his brother’s widow to raise up children in his brother’s name,” such that the dead would not be forgotten, and that the brother’s name continue. “But what if there were seven brothers, and each one in turn married the same woman, only to die childless? Whose wife would she then be in the resurrection,” when all of a sudden this one poor lady has to deal with seven husbands at once?

It’s a silly question. It’s meant to be. The Sadducees are going for a gotcha moment, trying to show that the hope of resurrection makes no sense once you examine it. Thermodynamics aside, the details soon become preposterous. “Defend your belief,” they challenge Him, and with it the promise of the Prophets.

Christ, as ever, has a rather clever comeback, presented with a smile or a sigh. He meets them where they are, quoting from the scriptures they consider most important. “In the Exodus,” Jesus replies, “Moses calls God the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” But He cannot be their God if they no longer exist; for He is God of the living, not of the dead. Ergo, the Law that they themselves revere proves that the Sadducees haven’t a leg to stand on. Jesus bests them at their own game, on their own terms.

Now, we cannot know the tone with which He spoke. Jesus may not have intended this as any sort of dogmatic proof. He might simply have been responding to a flippant question with a flippant answer, a bit of witty repartee. Personally, I find it comforting. God is the God of all who’ve ever lived; so as long as He is God, they all live in Him. But as for the mechanics, as for the details, we might as well be asking the shape of the color blue.

“You don’t get it,” Jesus tells them, and thereby tells us all. “There is no marriage in resurrection. The old order of things has passed away. In the age to come, you shall be as the angels, who cannot die. All shall be children of God; all shall be as brother and sister.” Whatever we think of the afterlife, we are likely wrong. It may be as difficult for us to imagine what is to come as it would be for an unborn child to picture life outside the womb.

I am aware that some people find this uncertainty disturbing. I remember one woman who reacted very negatively to this particular teaching of Jesus, because her husband had died. She did not want to imagine that in the life to come they would not be married. Of course I know of another woman—raised in the Mormon church, where they teach that marriages are eternal—for whom the thought of being wed to the same man for endless infinite aeons downright terrified her. And with good reason.

This latter instance might be somewhat closer to Jesus’ original meaning. In His day, marriages were hierarchical, something that He implicitly criticized. So the idea of all of us being equal children of God in the resurrection, living deathlessly as spiritual brothers and sisters, would have been a relief, a liberation.

The Sadducees believed in neither ghosts nor angels; I happen to believe in both. Indeed, I think that I have seen both, though that’s a tale for another time. Our job here below is not to get caught up in speculation on the world to come. Such simply is not ours to know. Our job rather is to live within the promise: the promise that God is the God of the living; the promise that death will not be our end; the promise that whatever lies ahead, it is far, far better than any we leave behind.

That woman, who hated the idea of not being married to the husband she so loved, she was afraid that what is to come will be less; that the resurrected life will divorce us, take from us, separate us; that death will be a loss. Jesus assures us that this is not the case. The life to come will be more, infinitely more: more life, more love, more bliss, more being. We are like acorns preparing to be oaks; we cannot imagine what it will be like, but it will be good. It will be wonderful. We shall become what we were always meant to be.

We will not lose the people whom we love. Rather, we shall know them for the very first time.

And the guarantor of all of this is Christ. Because Jesus did not teach us lessons in abstract. He did not speak of a resurrection about which He knew nothing. No, mere days after this exchange, He plunged headlong into hell. He died an awful death upon a cross and was sealed hastily away within another man’s tomb. And then He showed us the Resurrection. He showed us our new life in Him.

He has conquered death, hurled the stone aside, shattered the grip of the grave, and then—not content merely to offer us restoration to this world—He ascended into Heaven, to the right hand of the Father, there to reorder the celestial powers and to prepare a place for us amongst the gods. We shall be as HIs angels, traversing the heavens and earth.

We are not called to speculate on things beyond our ken. We are called to live as the Body of the Christ at work in this world today; to be foretastes of the feast to come; to offer to all the Life of Christ, the Spirit of the Living God, beyond sin, beyond death, beyond hell. We ourselves are the promise of the Prophets. We are the Resurrection, sent out to raise the dead. And to have faith that this is true—to have faith in Jesus’ faithfulness—is already to have eternal life, in the here and now.

So let us live like we believe it.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA

X: https://twitter.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987

Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/

Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100074108479275

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026

Search This Blog

Grimly Optimistic

Next

Comments

Post a Comment