Rev. Debbie Cato
Deuteronomy 25:5-10 and
Luke 20:27-38
Fairfield Community
Church
November 6, 2022
Lord, open our hearts and minds by the
power of your Holy Spirit, that as the scriptures are read and your Word is
proclaimed, we may hear with joy what you say to us this day. Silence in us any
voice but your own, that, hearing, we may be obedient to your will. Help us to live always for your glory,
through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
Amen.
Prove It, Jesus!
This is one of Jesus’ teachings that isn’t so easy to
understand. In fact, if you just read it
through, you might even say it just plain doesn’t make sense. I think it’s actually an interesting twist
that this teaching is confusing to us because the Sadducees ask their question
to try to trap Jesus. They were trying
to embarrass him in front of the large crowd gathered in the temple listening
to him teach. They come up with this
story about the widow and her seven husbands.
It’s a good story – a bit of a “yarn” as we used to call exaggerated tales.
Jesus is in Jerusalem. He has arrived at his destination. Jerusalem is full of Jews from all the nations. They are there to prepare for the Passover Feast – the Holy Days. For the last couple of days, Jesus has been at the temple, teaching. The Son of God is in The Temple of God. The chief priests and teachers of the law periodically interrupt him with questions, hoping to trick him and catch him speaking falsely about God. But they are unsuccessful. They can’t trap him.
And now the Sadducees come to Jesus with their own question. We haven’t heard a lot from the Sadducees because they don’t hang out in Galilee. They live in Jerusalem. They are responsible for the maintenance of the Temple so they stick close to home. The Sadducees are what you might call the “Establishment” of Jesus’ day.
The Pharisees and Sadducees, although both leaders of the Jewish faith, disagreed on doctrines or beliefs of their faith – I suppose we could almost compare them to different denominations of Christianity today. For instance, Sadducees believed that only the Pentateuch – the Torah or the Books of Moses were Sacred Scripture. The Pentateuch are the first five Books of what we call The Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. – often referred to as The Books of the Law. The Pharisees and most other Jews, accepted all of what we now call the Old Testament Scriptures. Of course then, it was all scrolls.
The other fundamental difference between the Pharisees and the Sadducees is that the Sadducees did not believe in a doctrine of resurrection of the dead and they did not believe in an afterlife. Death was the end. They believed that if there really were a resurrection, then God would have told Moses and Moses would have put it in the Pentateuch. Since Moses didn’t put a doctrine of resurrection into the Pentateuch, there could not be a resurrection.
But for the Sadducees, there was even more evidence that there was no such thing as a resurrection. There’s a law in Deuteronomy I read this morning. Now, Deuteronomy is part of the Torah, the Book of the Laws which the Sadduccees follow. If a married man dies without children, then it falls to his brother to take that man’s widow as his wife to produce a child for his late brother to assure him posterity. This law existed because the only way of bluffing past the universal reign of death was by having children. The only way to have a blessing in the land of the living is by having children; descendants that live after your death. It’s because of this that the man who dies without children needs his brother to get him the share in posterity that he couldn’t get for himself. If there’s no resurrection; no afterlife, you need children to keep your lifeline alive long after you have died.
So, sticking to the letter of the law, the Sadducees see if they can trap Jesus; embarrass him in front of the crowd. They get creative.
and leaves a wife but no
children, the man must marry the widow
and raise up offspring for his brother. 29 Now
there were seven brothers.
The first one married a woman and died childless. 30 The
second 31 and
then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving
no children. 32 Finally, the woman died too. 33 Now then, at the
resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to
her?”
All laughing aside, we need to understand that these are deeply religious men. They love God and follow the Holy Scriptures – the Law of Moses. they try to be faithful to their beliefs. Their Scriptures say nothing about a resurrection. Nothing about an afterlife.
Jesus doesn’t take their question as a personal attack. He doesn’t get defensive. Jesus doesn’t tell them their question; their example is outrageous. He uses it as a teachable moment about the nature of heaven; an opportunity to teach about the love and mercy of God. Jesus says,
“Heaven and earth are not the same! The ways of God are not the ways of
humanity. God’s judgments are not our
judgments. Things do not work in heaven
the way they work on earth!” I don’t know about you, but I think that’s
good news!
In heaven, even the lowliest of society are considered “like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection” - even someone like this woman who is passed from brother to brother like a used car.
You see, there was no place in the law asking the widow if she wanted to marry the brother. Wives were about producing children for the sake of descendants for their husbands. Women were property back in the patriarchal days of Abraham and Isaac and Moses. Women belonged to their husbands and had no rights. In some places, they still are. But, that’s the way of the world, Jesus says. In heaven things are different. In heaven, the widow, passed down from brother to brother – seven times, is like an angel, a child of God. She is precious.
This is a radical statement of the gospel! It is radical that in heaven there are no sociopolitical divisions! This is good news – not only to Jesus’ audience in the Jerusalem temple that day but to each of us today!
The mystery of the resurrection revealed by Jesus is that heaven is a place where those of us who have been dehumanized will be restored; those of us who have been oppressed will be set free; and those of us who have been treated as inferior will be raised up and called beloved. In heaven, those who are children of the resurrection will know the joy and peace that was kept from us on earth.
Jesus’ message to the Sadducees and the people in the temple that day is his message to us today as well. Oppression on earth does not dictate the rewards of heaven. The bondage and slavery of human life does not foresee how life will be in heaven. Persons who are victims of the dehumanizing systems of poverty, racism, sexism, classism, and all the other “isms” of the world will be freed from their earthly oppression and suffering. God is the God of the living – the God of newness, forgiveness, and liberation.
Jesus was in the temple in Jerusalem teaching the people when the Sadducees asked him about the resurrection. It was just a few days before this, people cheered and welcomed Jesus into their city. They welcomed him as their messiah. They thought he was a military king who was going to save them from the Roman political powerhouse. But Jesus understood his role very differently. He knew his arrival in Jerusalem was going to save the people, but not the way they expected he would. Jesus was well aware that what lie ahead for him was unimaginable and far from the kind of victory the people in Jerusalem wanted.
How ironic it must have been for Jesus to be faced with unbelief about the resurrection – the very way God was about to save the world. But can we blame them? The resurrection doesn’t make sense. The resurrection is absolutely unreasonable. Life after death doesn’t seem possible. It can't be supported by reason or by experience. All we have are the New Testament stories.
But we have a choice. We have a choice to say yes or to say no. We can choose to trust those stories in scripture. We can choose to trust God. We can choose to believe. That’s what faith is – believing what we cannot see; what we cannot fully understand. We have to claim it as our truth. Jesus rose from the dead. I choose to believe.
This episode with the Sadducees gives us enough hope to live and enough hope to face death. Death is not the end. Death does not win. Death is the end of many things, but it is not the end of everything. Our death is not the end of God who is the God of life; the God of children of the resurrection.
Jesus does not answer all our questions, though one of our greatest hopes is that he should. What he does do is point us to a God whose faithfulness is immeasurable and inexhaustible, and in that faithfulness we find enough to endure all that life and death will ask of us.
On Easter Sunday, we say with tremendous joy, “Jesus is risen! He has risen, indeed!” Friends, Jesus is the first, and by faith we will be raised too! Thanks Be to God! Amen.
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