This sermon was heard at the First Presbyterian Church in Marshall, Texas on Sunday November 7, 2010, the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time.
Psalm 98
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen
There’s an old joke, a riddle, a brain teaser if you will, you may have heard it before. It goes like this: “You have two coins, together they add up to thirty cents, and one of them is not a nickel. What are the coins?” Does anyone know the answer? Does anyone know what the two coins are? The coins are a quarter and a nickel. You may be asking yourself, “I thought he said one of them wasn’t a nickel?” You’re right, I did, and that’s the joke. One of them is not a nickel. The other one is. Ha-ha!
The purpose of this kind of riddle is so that the person who asks the question can feel witty and superior at the expense of the riddled. It’s not particularly funny as jokes go; it’s a moment to show off for the one who tells it. (Honestly, I think it’s nice when someone else knows the answer and spoils the joke. It takes the teller and pierces them right in their pomposity.)
Today’s reading from Luke takes that sort of tack as the Sadducees test Jesus on a point of levirate marriage. The Sadducees were the priestly, aristocratic party in Judaism, whose interests centered in the temple.
The views and practices of the Sadducees opposed those of the Pharisees. One of the differences between them is that the Sadducees represented the interests of the temple and its priesthood while the Pharisees represented the interests of the synagogue and its teachers. (Notice how no one was focused on the Lord or the people?) The Sadducees and the Pharisees also disagreed on the matter of the resurrection. The Sadducees did not believe in the prospect of the resurrection and the Pharisees did.
What the Sadducees and the Pharisees did agree on was that Jesus was dangerous.
To help understand what was at stake with the Sadducees’ question, we should know a little about something called levirate marriage. Quoting Deuteronomy, levirate marriage was a legal concept where “when brothers reside together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the deceased shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her, taking her in marriage, and performing the duty of a husband’s brother to her, and the firstborn whom she bears shall succeed to the name of the deceased brother, so that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.” The purpose of the law was to prevent marriage of the Israelite woman to an outsider maintaining national purity and to continue the name of the dead husband in Israel.
So as our reading opens, the Lord is at the temple. The triumphant entry of Palm Sunday happened a couple of days earlier. Jesus has run the money changers out of the temple. He has taught in the temple and his authority was questioned—then made stronger by the words he spoke. And he has been tested by the Jewish authorities, foiling their efforts at every turn.
So our Savior receives a question that could only come off of the “Sadducee Ordination Examination” about levirate marriage, but for them it was a trick question. After the resurrection, whose wife would this seven time married no child bearing woman be? She would be no one’s wife because there is no resurrection. Ha-ha! It’s the quarter and the nickel all over again.
But Jesus isn’t going to be taken in by their tricks. He takes another tack to answer their question.
Jesus tells the Sadducees and all who will listen that there is life in the resurrection because “The Lord is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him [Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob] are alive.” And he makes this point using the Lord’s very own words from the second Book of Moses. In Exodus, the Lord tells Moses at the bush which burns but is not consumed by the fire that the Lord is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Not the Lord was their God, but the Lord is their God. The Lord is still the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Lord continues to be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
To the Lord, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob live. In the Lord, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob live.
If we had read on we would have learned that this truth so amazed, maybe even dumbfounded, the Scribes who were there that they said, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” And because Jesus could leave the Sadducees speechless with such ease, composure, and style; depending on who “they” are in verse 40, either the Scribes or the Sadducees or both decided in that moment they wouldn’t ask Jesus another question.
There is life in the resurrection that the Sadducees couldn’t fathom. The new life is nothing like they have ever seen, experienced, or conceived. It is new life and does not resemble the life they know in any way. It’s not like life on earth only better; it is something completely new and different. It is life transformed.
This is why Jesus makes the distinction between the children of this age and the children of the age to come. The children of this age worry about questions of law and levirate marriage. Children of the coming age are concerned with praising and worshiping the Lord in the resurrected life, much like the angels live to praise and worship the Lord.
The children of this age are concerned with function and law. The people of the age to come are concerned with relationship and worship. Hold that thought, we’ll get back to it soon.
When I read this passage in the New International Version, I get the impression of this being just another test from the Jewish officials. But when I was reading this passage translating it from the Greek, there is a tone that I find missing in the English reading. Imagine the Sadducee stroking his beard and saying: “Teacher, there were seven brothers, and the first after taking a wife died childless, and the second and the third took her likewise and also they died and they left no children, then in the resurrection (which as we know, the Sadducees didn’t believe existed anyway) the woman becomes a wife to which of them?
As I read this, I found a sort of “butter won’t melt in his mouth” quality in the Sadducee’s question. Also I found, what we would consider, an antiquated view of the woman taken, being the possession of the husband.
It’s as if the lawyer says to a man “you get the house, the car, the Plasma TV, and the widow, in that order.”
The purpose of levirate marriage underscores the value of marrying within the clan and the importance of sons. There is truth that levirate marriage protects the woman who would have been without support after becoming widowed, but this is a bonus for her and had little to do with the rationale for the law. The value of the national purity and the family name took precedence over the value of the woman in levirate marriage.
So considering the purposes of levirate marriage and the words and the tone of the Sadducee, the value of the woman for the purposes of this test is just the value of her womb and her death. Her womb and her death, without these things, she would have been useless to this hypothetical situation. And considering she was barren, for the purposes of the test, as far as the Sadducees were concerned, the only thing she had of any value was her death.
Not her life, but her death.
The words and the tone of the Sadducee took a woman, a child of Abraham, a child of God, and made her into nothing. She was nothing more than ashes and dust—miraculously brought back to life in the resurrection—a resurrection the Sadducees didn’t believe existed—waiting to see whose wife she would be again. The hypothetical woman’s only purpose was as a pawn in a story to try to trick Jesus.
If you find this interpretation of the story offensive, I find this offensive too. And based on his response, I believe Jesus found it offensive too. Jesus would have nothing to do with a story shrouded in abuse and death just to make a point.
Finding the Sadducees take on this woman offensive shows we don’t live in their world either. Thanks be to God! We have taken at least one step past the legalistic functionalism of the Sadducees and moved toward the age to come and the grace of resurrected life.
As this life in the Lord changes people then, it continues to change us now.
We are called to live the resurrection life revealed to Moses and explained to the Sadducees in the temple by Jesus.
We are to live in the resurrection life Jesus promises one and all. We are to live in the resurrection life Jesus gives so graciously. We are to live the resurrected life of worship and praise. We are called to live the resurrected life in relationship with God and with one another.
The resurrection is not about death and return to the life we have lived on earth amplified. Life in the resurrection is a radical transformation. Resurrected life takes flawed sinful men like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and makes them patriarchs, fathers of the faith. Resurrected life takes humanity and places us in holy communion with the Lord and with the angels in a life that will never perish. Resurrected life is like the bush which burned before Moses, it burns, it radiates with the light of the Lord God, but it is not consumed.
The Sadducees consumed the life of the hypothetical woman, in Christ she lives.
The Sadducees consumed the life of the hypothetical woman, in Christ she lives.
Resurrected life is unlike anything the Sadducees know, but it was available to them through life in the Lord. More importantly, it is available to us now. Resurrected life in Jesus is not something that has to wait for our death to join; it is available to us now. Jesus made this clear when he declared that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob live—present tense-live—before his resurrection, indeed before his earthly birth.
Aye, when we share in the presence of the Lord we will share in the resurrection life in the presence of the Triune God, and the Lord our God does not want us to wait for our deaths to live the resurrection life. As stewards of all God’s good gifts, the Lord our God wants us to begin living that life today, a life of relationship and worship. We are called to seek to live in the Lord our God. We are called to live in the resurrection now, long before our own deaths.
I am happy that we live in a time and place that sees women as more than the sum of their lady parts. Yet this is not true everywhere. I would love to say that women and men are equal partners in this realm, but this is not true either.
Yet, to quote Paul’s letter to the Galatians, despite our earthly divisions, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” In the resurrection life, we are one.
We are called to live, live our lives in the resurrection now. But we don’t, not yet. But this is not something for us to beat ourselves up about, it is a simple fact of our earthly lives in a sin stained creation. As stewards of life in Christ we are called to do is discern how to best respond to God in our situation and context. We are called to discern what God is calling us to do now.
It’s about asking better questions than “whose wife is she?” and it’s about seeking better relationship with God and with one another. It’s not about trying to maintain life as we know it; it’s about being transformed through life in Christ. We are called to this because we are called to something far better than the life we live now. We are called to something seek and strive for a life worthy of relationship with God, not within function and law.
We are called to be transformed in Christ, not maintained in our own plans and purposes. We are to be transformed in and through relationship with God and with one another. This isn’t easy; if it were easy we would not need Christ.
Life in the resurrection is glorious. Life in Christ is life eternal. Resurrection life transforms us into the people the Lord wants us to be, the people we were intended to be from before the beginning. Living is more than the day to day existence many face today. Real life is lived in the love, peace and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
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