'Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus 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 shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her."
Jesus said to them, "Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; 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. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. 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. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."'
--Luke 20: 27-38
Every week I find a spot somewhere to sit – usually a coffee shop, or maybe a place to eat lunch- and I have a little sign that reads “Free prayers and conversations.” You wouldn’t believe some of the folks who stop by and talk with me and some of the things that they have to say. Some are prayer requests – even from folks who say they don’t believe, but they ask me to pray for folks who do – or one time when a random stranger handed me 20 bucks and said in a Northeastern accent: “Here, Fadda, this is for the church!” Sometimes, though, I get a little tripped up; someone will have a deep theological question that I can’t easily answer, one in which it feels like I’m caught in a kind of trap. One such question I’ve been asked on more than one occasion is If the resurrection is real, what’s it like?
Weekly setup.
I’ve tried, in those moments, to remember how Jesus answered a question like that. We find him this morning during the final week of his life, teaching in the Temple. After confrontations with scribes, chief priests, and Pharisees, now it’s the Sadducees’ turn to go toe-to-toe with Jesus, the only time they ever do so. We talk a lot about the Pharisees, but who were the Sadducees? The Jewish historian Josephus described the Sadducees as wealthy, urban, conservative aristocrats. Where the Pharisees cared little about politics—anyone could be in power as long as the Pharisees got to exercise their faith—the Sadducees were the high priestly class, part of the collaboration system with the Roman Empire, and hell-bent on maintaining their wealth and status. They followed only Torah—the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures—and ignored the prophets, the Psalms, or any other wisdom literature. They did not believe in a day of resurrection; after all, if you’re rich and powerful, who needs an afterlife? Nor did they believe in a coming Messiah. Both events would cause a disturbance to their carefully ordered lives. So when they approach Jesus with a question about resurrection, they are not at all being sincere, but rather they just want to trip him up with a question designed to humiliate him and his ridiculous belief. This moment is “gotcha journalism” at its finest, to borrow a line from a colleague.
Their question goes something like this: OK, Jesus, if there really is a resurrection, suppose a woman’s husband dies and they have no children, prompting the man’s brother to marry her in accordance with the Law, but he dies childless, and the pattern continues until the woman has married all seven brothers without bearing a child. So whose wife will she be at the resurrection?
You can hear the smugness come through, can’t you? We got him, they’re saying to themselves, maybe even with a dude-bro fist bump or two. Then Jesus responds, and his response is so profound that Luke says in the very next sentence following the end of our reading today, that nobody dared question him from this point forward.
So how about that response? The Sadducees think that if there is a resurrected life, then it must follow the same pattern and rules as this one, and this life is governed by Torah, the Law. In the Law there is the prescription for a man to marry his dead brother’s widow if no children are born. The reason that this Law exists is to maintain justice for the widows, to be sure that they are not forced to live as beggars after their husbands’ deaths. It is a well-meaning law, but it fails in one crucial way: it treats women as property. “Whose wife will she be?” they ask, implying a sense of ownership.
Immediately, Jesus rejects this. His rejection is not of marriage but of possession. He acknowledge that in this age people are “given” in marriage, but it is not so in the age to come; that is, in the resurrected life with God. It’s important to remember that in Jesus’ day marriage was not an institution oriented around romantic love and affection between two people, but a rather it was an economic institution, whereby families’ allegiances were maintained in the giving of a daughter away in exchange for a dowry. But, as Jesus points out, in the resurrected life with God, no one is “given” in marriage because that great sacrament from God that makes two become one is not about possession or property but about belonging; the couple’s belonging to each other, which reflects all of humanity’s belonging to God. As our own marriage rite says, it is a reflection of Christ’s love for us, a reminder of that belonging. To imply that a woman would remain the property of a man in the age to come is to infer that God’s future is merely an extension of our own present, but Jesus makes clear that resurrection entails transformation into something new, or in this case into that original vision of how God intended for people to be in relationship with one another.
The original vision of God, as we have said before, is justice for all of God’s children. This is an important piece to remember, because, as collaborators with Rome, the Sadducees had a stake in maintaining unjust systems. Of course, they will deny a resurrection, or some life to come with God, because if there is no resurrection then this life right now is all there is and the only opportunity for God’s justice to be realized, and that is bad news for a population under Roman occupation. It’s bad news for anyone who has known and still knows the sting of injustice, the endless cries that fall on deaf ears. But the reality of resurrection gives hope to the oppressed, a promise that there will come a day when God will break through, and justice will roll down like waters for all of creation. Such a promise was terrifying for the Sadducees.
What is the one thing that people in power are most afraid of? Losing their power. Resurrection takes the power that humanity has tried to claim, over one another, and over life itself, and gives it back to God. Resurrection reminds us, reassures us, that, to quote the prophet, “My ways are not your ways,” says the Lord. In our time we see this with the fast rise of artificial intelligence and the attempts by the billionaire tech-bros – something of a modern-day Sadduceess – to overcome that pesky little problem of death, so that their power and influence will live on forever. But only one thing lives forever, and that is love. The love of the God who is love, the love Jesus embodies in feeding the multitudes, healing the sick, and letting the state kill him, only to mock death to its face three days later and show the world that even the grave can’t hold down love. The rules on this side of the kingdom, a side that is permeable and broken, no longer apply. Our addictions to possessions, prestige, and power, have no place in a resurrected life.
How fitting, then, that we read this passage one week after All Saints Day? We were reminded then that those we love but see no longer are alive in the resurrected life that will be ours one day; a life that is beyond the injustices of our own time because God is God, not of the dead, but of the living – for God there is no distinction between the two; “life is changed, not ended,” our burial rite says. This is the life that is to come beyond death, yes, but it is also the life that is to come here, on earth as in heaven. It is a promise for which we all hope; truly, good news for the poor. Resurrection is simply the nature of who God is, and cannot ever be understood with minds that cannot imagine a reality beyond their own experiences, as the Sadducees had. We can keep scratching the perpetual itch of uncertainty, waiting for more proof to be given so that we have a better answer and understanding, or we can start seeing life, the life right now, as well as the life to come, through resurrection eyes. The proof will be in the living.
