That same day Sadducees, who deny that there is a resurrection, came to Jesus. 24 They asked, “Teacher, Moses said, If a man who doesn’t have children dies, his brother must marry his wife and produce children for his brother. 25 Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married, then died. Because he had no children he left his widow to his brother. 26 The same thing happened with the second brother and the third, and in fact with all seven brothers. 27 Finally, the woman died. 28 At the resurrection, which of the seven brothers will be her husband? They were all married to her.”
29 Jesus responded, “You are wrong because you don’t know either the scriptures or God’s power. 30 At the resurrection people won’t marry nor will they be given in marriage. Instead, they will be like angels from God. 31 As for the resurrection of the dead, haven’t you read what God told you, 32 I’m the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He isn’t the God of the dead but of the living.” 33 Now when the crowd heard this, they were astonished at his teaching. (Common English Bible)
“The Passion Asks, and Christ Answers: Jesus Teaches at the Temple,” Week Three
My mom, upon hearing about the boys’ soccer team stranded in a cave in Thailand, did what many an overprotective parent is wont to do.
She called her son. Me. To make sure that I was not presently in Thailand and that if I was, that I was not in any caves, and that I would make sure to stay away from any caves.
As you probably know by now, those boys were all rescued and hospitalized, although one Thai Navy SEAL, Petty Officer First Class Saman Kunan, died during the rescue from asphyxiation. All of those stranded, it looks like so far, appear on their way to recovering fully—physically, anyways.
We might well want to call such a rescue a miracle. And we would not be entirely wrong in doing so. For miracles might come not just from God intervening directly, but from God acting through the talents and generosities of God’s human children.
Among those divine children have been the nearby rice farmers who have volunteered in aiding the rescue effort by cooking, organizing, praying—all the while the water from the caves was diverted directly onto their fields, damaging and in some cases ruining their crop for the year.
Asked by journalists about their losses, the area farmers were quick to reply—We don’t care about that right now. We can find ways to recover. We just want the boys to be safe.
Their crops may have been dead, but the farmers were not cultivating simply the crops—they were cultivating community, and human life. Look for the fruit not in the dead rice, but in the living boys.
Can you imagine those being the only responses you would get if the exact same scenario took place here in the United States? Because based on how out-of-control our lack of empathy and worship of individualism are, I can so very easily someone saying, essentially, “This is my property, and they should have thought of this before they toured the caves.”
And there will be those claim that this is the righteous and morally authoritative response, like when “Joe the Plumber” (remember him?) said to grieving parents after a school shooting that “your dead kids don’t trump my rights.” Such “moral authority” seeks to reign over the dead, not the living.
But from whence does such moral authority issue? How is it later revoked? And how are we to respect any authority, if authority in turn does not respect the humanity of those who’re under it?
All of these questions, and more, form the basis of the sermon series that I will be spending these several weeks unpacking with you, which I have entitled “The Passion Asks, and Christ Answers.” Jesus teaching at the temple is a scene that happens twice in the chronology of His life—once when He is an adolescent, in the Gospel of Luke, and again during Holy Week when He is an adult.
The back-and-forth debate between the adult Jesus and the temple authorities as depicted in the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is, at a glance, the sort of stuff that evangelical dreams are made of: a chance to publicly debate your theological opponents in the grandest square ever, and for all the marbles! It’s the entire basis of the God’s Not Dead franchise, and the premise behind so many other Christian stories, books, even radio adventures.
Naturally, there is quite a bit more to the picture than that, and the aim of this sermon series is, and has been, to try to paint a much more accurate portrait of what was being said, and why, when Jesus was teaching at the temple as an adult. We began two weeks ago by setting the scene with the story of Jesus being asked about His authority, and last week we tackled the famous “Render Unto Caesar” passage about paying taxes. This week, we’ll delve into the story which immediately follows, initially about levirate marriage, but really about a much deeper philosophical question.
Jesus’s questioners this time are the Sadducees, another sect of ancient Judaism separate from the Pharisees. When discussing the Passion story in particular, these distinctions matter, because simply treating Jesus’s questioners uniformly is a heavy-handed approach that is both ahistorical and harmful. Ancient Judaism was a rich, complex, and theologically diverse tradition, and treating Jesus’s questioners as caricatures won’t actually get you or me any closer to the truth within this story; it will only cause pain to our Jewish siblings.
One of the biggest theological and philosophical differences between the Sadducees and the Pharisees was the question of whether heaven—or any sort of afterlife in general—existed. The Pharisees, who held that the entirety of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, was sacred scripture, believed in the afterlife. The Sadducees, who held only the Torah, or the five books historically ascribed to Moses, as authoritative, believed there was no life after death.
It is that fundamental presupposition of only this life existing that undergirds the Sadducees’ query of Jesus in this periscope. Because if you accept their premise, the question actually makes a great deal of sense. Levirate marriage refers to the practice of a widow becoming the wife of one of her husband’s relatives, so that she would remain within the family unit and thus provided for and protected. For in those days, there was no social security in the modern sense. It is why there are so many mandates--in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament alike--to care for widows. It wasn't just about their emotional needs, but their daily sustenance needs as well.
In the afterlife, the Sadducees ask, whose wife would she be? Her original husband’s, or every single of her husband’s?
Those are two awkward answers, for obvious reasons. The Sadducees likely looked at such a conundrum as a reason for why there could not be an afterlife, because it could not be fully compatible with the Torah (or, at least, with their particular interpretation of the Torah).
But if you haven’t picked up on a common theme of these public debates yet, that common theme is that Jesus is not prepared to simply accept the same presuppositions as His questioners—namely, that marriage as we understand it is necessarily present at the resurrection of God’s children.
Perhaps hearing that alarms you. It should not. Something can be of God, or from God, but still ultimately have been defined over time by humans and thus our expectations of it may not be God’s expectations of it. We can say that God gives or creates life, but it is we humans who have attempted to define when life begins and ends in debates over stem cell research, physician-assisted suicide, brain death, and more.
Similarly, God may have inspired or ordained marriage, but over the millennia it has been humanity who has attempted to define what marriage is, from one man to many women, or one man and a harem, to one man and one woman, to simply two people who love each other regardless of identity or orientation.
What Jesus is saying is that human definitions are rendered moot in the afterlife, because we won’t be like humans, but like angels. Might there be some angelic version of marriage? Possibly. But certainly not exactly the same as the human version of marriage.
At bottom, Jesus is saying that resurrection entails a radical transformation, from humanness into something else, into being angelic or divine or heavenly. And that transformation is not accounted for enough in the question posed to Him.
The truth is, there is no one thing that you or I can only be in this life, or in the next. We each wear a multitude of hats, and bear on our covers a multitude of labels. For years, in college and then in seminary, I wanted so badly to be a pastor and a college debate champion, and nothing else, that I forgot how to want most other things, or to want to be other things.
That isn’t the future Jesus envisions for us at the resurrection. Resurrection means becoming something new and wondrous to behold, not simply a restored facsimile of what once was. Resurrection inherently includes evolution and metamorphosis.
What about the woman in this question? Who else, and what else is she, besides someone's wife? Who else could she be? Her name, her likes, dislikes, interests...and for that matter, what about the seven brothers as well? Who are they?
So no, heaven will not look exactly like earth. Which means that if any person tells you they know exactly what heaven looks like, or exactly who gets in and who stays out, be they a pastor like me or a Christian talking head on the telly, they are not telling you the whole truth of what resurrection well and truly entails.
God is not the god of the dead, but of the living.
Living things and living people morph into newer and greater things and people. We do not have to settle for only being one thing. The farmers in Thailand did not settle for only being farmers, concerned only for their fields and their crops while boys were trapped in flooded caves nearby.
No, they, like you, like me, and like any of us, were more than their occupation. They transcended their occupation. And from that transcendence came visible signs of lifegiving and generosity of spirit that I have to think that any God of the living would surely approve of.
So what can you do today, and the next day, and the next week, to be the image of the God of the living? What can you do to reflect that divine reality to others, en route to your own resurrection?
Let your fields flood with the goodness of God.
Let others dive deep into the love of Christ you share.
And may the world be forever the better for your courage in choosing to do so.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson, D.Min.
Olympia, Washington
July 15, 2018