A sermon on Luke 20:27-38 by Nathan Nettleton

Several times over the last few weeks, I’ve made mention of Jesus’ relationship with the Pharisees, and I’ve suggested to you that he probably had more respect for and far more in common with the Pharisees than with the other main factions of Judaism in his day. Well, in today’s reading, we come across one of those other main factions, the Sadducees, and I think you will see the contrast. At first glance this story is just another in a series about religious leaders putting curly questions to Jesus and Jesus seeing them off with a unanimous points decision from the judges. But there are good reasons to think that this one, despite being about the silliest question, is a rather more important story than just that. The question and, more importantly, the answer are about the reality of resurrection life, and three out of the four gospels place virtually identical versions of this story right here in the immediate lead-up to the Passion stories, the accounts of the arrest and execution of Jesus.

The Sadducees were the upper class of Jewish society in Jesus’ day. For the most part, they were wealthy and powerful. They had a fairly cosy relationship with the Roman occupation forces that enabled them to maintain their positions of privilege in the Temple hierarchy. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but it probably gives you something of the flavour of the situation: if the Pharisees were the religious Puritans of the day, obsessed with getting every individual to live in rigorous obedience to every line of scripture, the Sadducees were the ruling establishment, more concerned with maintaining stability and a secure and accepted place for Israel and its faith in the world. And in this story, they are introduced to us as those who say there is no resurrection.

Now this is not meant to say that they are secularist liberals who dismiss the teachings of scripture. Belief in a future resurrection of the dead was a relatively new development in Judaism. Throughout most of the Hebrew Bible, there is very little evidence of any belief in a resurrection from the dead or even of heaven-or-hell concepts of life after death. Mostly any concept of any kind of existence after death is of Sheol, the land of shadows, where dead souls hover forever in a kind of vague shadow of half life. And there was no thought that anyone would ever be raised back to life from there.

So, although the fact that they didn’t believe in resurrection distinguished the Sadducees from the Pharisees, it was hardly unusual or evidence of deviant heresy. For most Jewish people then, and I reckon for most people in our society today, the only real influential concept of life after death had to do with the legacy you left in this world when you departed. I went to a church funeral this week, and like most funerals today, almost nothing was said about any expectation of a future resurrection or even about the deceased person passing into an anticipated life after death. Instead, like most funerals now, it was a celebration of the life of the deceased and a thanksgiving for all the ways his legacy would live on in the lives of those he had left behind, and in particular, in his children and grandchildren.

That was how the Sadducees saw it too. And, they reckoned, they had the teachings of Moses on their side too. This is where their complex hypothetical question about the wife who is widowed by seven brothers in succession comes in. It is not a meaningless hypothetical. What they are picking up on is a section of the Law of Moses known as the Levirate law. The Levirate law said that if a married man died childless, his brother was to marry his widow and the first child born would be counted as the offspring of the dead man, thus ensuring his name and legacy lived on.

So the point that the Sadducees were trying to make was that this law made it clear that Moses accepted that the only way a person lives on after death was through their children, and there is no greater authority than Moses, so clearly any belief in a resurrection is a load of bunk. But because they know that Jesus believes in a resurrection, they spin the story out into a fairly extreme hypothetical in order to ridicule it as fully as possible. There is clearly an element of comedy going on here. It reminds me a bit of those adds for insurance where that bloke is questioning the comprehensiveness of the insurance policy by coming up with more an more bizarre possibilities that might not be covered, and he ends up asking what the insurers would do if aliens come down and carry off his car with his family in it.

Now we could unpack Jesus’ answer as it relates to understandings of marriage, and of the differences between life before death and life after death and how they relate to marrying or not marrying, but the stuff about marriage is not really the main point. The question about marriage is only a furphy designed to ridicule the idea of resurrection, and although Jesus does dignify it with a quick answer, he quickly turns to their main point: “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 has softened Jesus’ response a little. In Matthew’s and Mark’s versions, Jesus begins his reply to the Sadducees by saying, “You are wrong, because you do not understand either the scriptures or the power of God.”

And really what Jesus is doing, in all three versions, is turning the issue to our understanding of God and the power of God. In particular, he is saying that God is a God of life, a God of the living, a God who is all about life, life and more life. And he is calling us to recognise how radically this contrasts with what we are on about and what we mostly think God is on about. Because what the Levirate law really shows, Jesus is saying, and what the way we mostly conduct funerals nowadays is saying too, is that we are obsessed with death and with a fear of what will happen if we die before we have carved out a lasting legacy in the world that will ensure us some kind of ongoing impact in the land of the living. I imagine that most of you, like me, frequently get letters from banks and insurance companies trying to ramp up exactly this fear. How will your family be provided for if death suddenly comes your way? It is such a powerful and all-pervasive fear that mostly we are unwilling to even talk about it. And part of what Jesus is saying is that, for us, it is such a dominating factor in our view of life that we are completely unable to understand a God for whom death barely registers as anything more than a slight annoyance. For us, death is a huge man-eating shark shadowing our every move and whose victory over us is only a matter of time, but for God death is nothing more than an annoying solitary mosquito who can be seen off with nothing more than a swat of the hand.

Even much of evangelical Christian thinking in our day has stumbled off down this same dead end that the Sadducees were in. Although we espouse a belief in resurrection, much of our understanding is still dominated by death so that salvation becomes another form of insurance policy that deals with the same big hovering shark. And so Jesus would be saying to us too, that as long as we think salvation is mostly about what happens after death, then we too are failing to understand God and the power of God, for God is all about life, life and more life. For us, before death and after death are like BC and AD on the calendar; the big divide that separates two fundamentally different eras, but from God’s perspective, before death and after death are no more significant than before Thursday and after Thursday. God is not God of the dead, but God of the living; for to God all of us are alive, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Mary, Frances Lambert, and all of us.

For us, this change of mindset is not going to come easily. It is a radical conversion, a total wipe-the-hard-drive and start reprogramming kind of thing. We don’t understand and we can’t fully understand. Jesus is the only one who really gets it and we are only capable of catching glimpses of it as we hang out with him and hang on his every word. But as we do that, as we gather here regularly and listen to his words and gather with him around his table, those glimpses will come more often and begin working their transformation in us. The words of life are spoken into our midst, and the bread of life is placed into our hands and fed to our bodies, and we are plunged into the waters of life. Life, life, and more life. Life to be lived in freedom. Life to be lived to the full. Life that bubbles up and runs over and floods the universe and eternity and reduces even the most hideous suffering and death to little more than a three day weekend break. Life, life, and more life. May we be saved into it, and grow into it, and be raised from death into it. All praise and glory be to the God of life!