AtomOf Riddles and Resurrection
Luke 20:27-30
As we were reading the Gospel lesson this morning, did it strike you as a bit odd? I mean, this question that the Sadducees asked: “Once there were seven brothers…and they all ended up marrying this woman…and none of them had children by her…so, on the day when the dead rise to life, whose wife will she be?
It doesn’t really sound like a serious question does it? When I read it, it sounds like one of those trick questions where the answer is so obvious you know it must be wrong, or one of those questions where no matter how you answer, it’s wrong. In short, the whole situation smells like a trap for Jesus. Which it is. But I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself here. Let me set the scene:
For the past few months we have been following Jesus’ steady journey toward Jerusalem in the gospel of Luke. We know even as he is journeying that the great climax of his life waits for him there. For it is here in Jerusalem that he will be rejected and die. And Jesus seems to know it. He seems to know that when he reaches Jerusalem he will encounter fierce opposition to his ministry… and very likely come face to face with his own death.
Here in chapter 20, we have arrived. Jesus is in Jerusalem and the opposition is plotting to do him in. The verses that precede today’s lesson tell of how one group of religious or political leaders – Pharisees, Scribes, etc.—after another confront Jesus and ask him tricky, difficult questions designed to discredit his ministry or label him as revolutionary so they can turn him over to the authorities. Jesus has proved too wise for each group so far, but today the Sadducees come to take a crack at him.
Now, you should know some things about the Sadducees. First of all, they were the wealthy aristocrats of ancient Israel. They were the upper class, the governing class. They largely cooperated with Rome in its rule over Israel because they were unwilling to risk their wealth, their comfort and their important place in society. As to their faith, they believed that God’s word could only be found in the books of Moses – the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. They set no stock in the Psalms or Prophetic books. If it wasn’t in the first five, it wasn’t from God. In particular, they rejected belief in God’s promised Messiah, and belief in the resurrection of the dead. When they read Moses, they heard him speak of neither and so to both they said, “Baloney,” or some Jewish equivalent. And to this end, they set their little trap for Jesus just to show how ridiculous the whole idea of resurrection was.
“Once there were seven brothers…” Moses had given a law that said that the brothers of a man who died before having children by his wife were responsible to marry the widow and to have children so that their brother’s name and lineage might continue, and so their question: “Once there were seven brothers…” The oldest brother married and died before having children, so the second married his widow, etc. Now, if you were the seventh brother, would you have gone through with this? Of course it was a ridiculous, impossible situation…if there were indeed a resurrection, why, she would be married to all seven…therefore, the Sadducees reasoned, the very idea of resurrection contradicted the laws of Moses. How could God’s word contradict God’s word? So, the belief in the resurrection of the dead must be false! It is indeed a clever trap…designed so that they might dismiss Jesus and his teaching as being false.
Now, as I studied this passage, I was reminded of some of the mind games that human thinkers, philosophers and the like play to belittle the idea of an Almighty Creator God. There is an old riddle that you may have heard. It is designed to trap and confuse. It goes like this: “If nothing is impossible for God…can God create a stone too large for God to lift?” Do you see the problem in the question? Of course. Such questions are ridiculous, designed so that people, like the Sadducees and certain philosophers, don’t have to take the things of God seriously.
I am reminded of a group of hecklers who came to Martin Luther one day and asked an equally irrelevant, unanswerable question, something like: “What was God doing before God created the heavens and the earth?” And Luther said, “Creating hell for people who ask stupid questions like yours!” Luther had such a gentle spirit!
Now, Jesus was not quite so brash as Luther in his answer to the Sadducees. Notice, he does not even attempt to answer their trick question. Rather, he points to two misconceptions that they have expressed regarding the resurrected life. First, they assume that resurrection life will operate under the same rules as life her on this earth. Not so! According to Jesus, God will be doing something completely new. Marriage will not longer be necessary for the reproduction and continuation of life on earth. For then none will die…life will continue forever in God’s presence. As good a gift as marriage is, God apparently has something even better in mind for us, something so perfect we may not even be ready for it.
Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion, in one of his delightful descriptions of the people in his fictional hometown of Lake Wobegon, tells how difficult it will be for some to deal with that kind of perfection:
“My people aren’t paradise people,” he says. “We’ve lived in Minnesota all our lives and it has taken a lot out of us. My people aren’t even sure if we’ll even like paradise, not sure that perfection is all it’s cracked up to be. My people will arrive in heaven and stand just inside the gate, shuffling around. ‘It’s a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be,’ we’ll think. And we’ll say, “No, thank you, we can’t stay for eternity. We’ll just sit and have a few minutes of bliss with you and then we have to get back.’
“We were brought up to work, not complain, accept that life is hard and make the best of what little we have, so when we come to the grandeur and grace of an eternal flower garden ringed by mountains beside a pale blue coral sea under the continuous sun, we naturally say, ‘Oh, no thanks, it’s too much, really. I don’t care for it, just give me some snow and ice, please.’”
Keillor’s people may not be too different than the Sadducees. God has something far greater in mind than anything we can imagine. Resurrection is going to be a whole new experience and we can’t know what it will be like based upon what we see here.
The second problem that the Sadducees had with resurrection was that Moses didn’t say anything about it. Jesus here directs their attention to Moses’ first encounter with the Living God. When God spoke from the burning bush and said, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Of course by the time of Moses, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were long gone from this earth. The Sadducees believe that God was the God of the living and that death meant the end. Dead was dead – forever, eternally separated from the earth and from God. Shouldn’t God have said, “I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?” But God says, “I am…” According to Jesus, if God is the God of the living, which God is, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob still live or will certainly live again.
Have I lost you, yet? Jesus has just set his questioners on their heels. He has beaten them with their own question. But you may be wondering by now, “What does all this have to do with me?” Maybe a lot. Maybe we’re not as different from the Sadducees as we would like to think. In spite of the fact that we confess belief in the resurrection of the dead, perhaps we have trouble living as if we believe it. We spend so much energy and focus on this life and finding as much satisfaction as possible here, as if we didn’t believe that this life is only the foretaste of much greater things to come.
I believe it is because we base much of our hope upon experience; we make decisions based upon what has served us in the past. We send our resumes out to the kinds of companies that we have worked for in the past. We fish or hunt in a certain spot because we have had results there before. We give credit to a certain individual because in the past they have paid their bills. But when it comes to the resurrection we have no past experience on the matter. I heard an interview this week of Pulitzer Prize winning author Studs Terkel, who has written a new book on death and dying. He told the interviewer that the book was tough to write because there are no experts to interview! No one has seen the other side of death and returned. A few of us have had near death experiences and dreams where we believe God has shown us something of the future, but by and large we just don’t know. We struggle to imagine it and to take it seriously. We may not ridicule it like the Sadducees. We may simply ignore it.
Yet we have one truth in our lives that the Sadducees lacked. We have the surprise of Easter! Based upon the past, the Sadducees thought they had god figured out. They were laughing up their sleeves at the idea of resurrection; God could not do anything new in the world. It is God, however, who has the last laugh! In Jesus Christ God did the surprising thing! The dead are indeed raised! Jesus is the proof of that!
When all is said and done, the resurrection of Jesus is the essential core of our faith. When the possibility of eternal life seems unreal, even impossible; when we lose those whom we love and begin to wonder if it is really true; when we consider the philosopher’s question, “Is there really a God who cares?”, we are always confronted with the truth of the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection of Jesus is the living promise that this life is not all there is! Jesus promised it. Then he lived it.
The Sadducees were wrong. The scoffers today are wrong. Even our own doubts are wrong.
I’m reminded of a little story I heard once. I’m not sure quite how it fits, but I think it does. It goes like this:
A skeptic once teased a Christian friend by asking, “Say George, what would you say if, after you die, you found there wasn’t such a place as heaven after all?” With a smile, the believer replied, “I would say, ‘Well, I’ve had a good time getting here anyway.’” Then he added, “Say Fred…what would you say if, when you die, you found there was such a place as heaven after all…and you had missed it?”
The good news is this: Jesus has been raised! The one who gives his life for us also gives his life to us. To those who believe is given the gift of eternal life. Heaven is real! Thanks be to God! Amen.
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