When Jesus is confronted in Jerusalem by the Sadducees, they ask a convoluted question about the afterlife. So Jesus changes the conversation.
Hint: there’s no right answer.
Proper 27C
Luke 20:27-40
“Teacher,”
They address him. Perhaps its equal parts honor and direction. They call him teacher so that he knows what hat they expect he’ll wear. As if to say, Teacher, teach us something.
“Teacher, Moses wrote for us…”
So they appeal to him as a teacher. Then they direct him to the Law.
They are going to the rulebook, the tradition, the history, the great teacher who taught the people, who spoke for God in the Exodus. This is not about whether to eat meat on Fridays in Lent. This is deeper than canon law and more central than custom.
“Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies…”
The lead-up to the question is as long as the lead-up to this sermon.
So here is the question in a nutshell. Since they have an old tradition called levirate marriage which could allow a bunch of brothers to marry the same woman to maintain lineage and property, which of them gets to possess her in the afterlife?
Now, we could dig into this tradition, and it would be a lot of fun to do that. But we’re not going to. Because it’s a red herring.
Who are the Sadducees?
Follow it: the text gives you everything you need.
These people confronting Jesus are Sadducees. Who are they? We don’t know much about them as a sect of Judaism. They appear to die out between the time of Jesus (around 30 CE) and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Virtually everything we know about them comes from the gospel stories.
And what it says is that they were a sect of Jews who didn’t believe in the resurrection. Which, to be fair, wasn’t universally held, either. So they aren’t weird.
Now, these guys who don’t believe in the resurrection of the body, meaning people coming back to life, quite literally zombie-style are asking a question about the resurrection.
They’re standing there looking at Jesus going, So how does this work, Jesus? We get seven boy zombies and one girl zombie; who gets the happily ever after here?
Do you hear just how incredulous these questions are? Which dude gets her in that afterlife we will never believe in? They didn’t come to Jesus hoping to learn, willing to be shown the truth. They’ve come to trick him with a less-than-serious question! This is a trap.
Jesus is in Jerusalem
It’s worth backing up a moment to see the big picture. Luke 20 takes place in Jerusalem. They have already made their Triumphal Entry on Palm Sunday and Jesus has already predicted his impending death multiple times. And the first thing he did when he got inside the city was go straight to the Temple and tear up the place.
He then spends several days going back to the Temple where he stirs up the crowd. People are adoring him. It’s like its 2015 and he’s bigger than Hamilton. You can’t get tickets. People love what he is offering them. He has somehow made dead political figures hot again.
So some Pharisees step up to him and challenge his authority. Jesus beats them back. Take your fake sincerity somewhere else! Then Jesus tells a parable calling them out—like a crazy sick burn.
It’s all a trap
And then this is what it says in verse 20:
“So they watched him and sent spies who pretended to be honest, in order to trap him by what he said, so as to hand him over to the jurisdiction and authority of the governor.”
I’m not sure if you heard that: it’s pretty subtle: these religious leaders are lying liars who are making stuff up so they can get rid of an itinerate rabbi.
And what do these spies do? They ask him if it is OK to pay taxes. You’ve heard that passage used to talk about the separation of church and state and all manner of things. But that’s not really the point. The point is that these people ask him dishonest questions. But Jesus doesn’t pretend like they are honest. He turns them toward God.
And when Jesus turns the conversation back to God, they are silenced.
This is when the Sadducees arrive on the scene. They offer the third in a series of dishonest questions to Jesus. Each one picking at a part of the Law, calibrated carefully to trap him in a web of conflicting rules. Their intention is not to clarify God and make God known among the people. The point is to call Jesus a heretic so they can kill him.
If you’re scoring at home, they’re 0-for3.
The Question they should be asking
You know I have a hard time reading passages like this one without their context. Primarily because it strips the reason why we shouldn’t treat their question seriously. We do this all the time. We break big things down to singular ideas and “gotcha” questions.
It also keeps us from seeing a context in which the masses are right.
Jesus is confronting selfish, human corruption and its narrowing view. And he’s confronting the way tradition fails to turn our focus to God. The smallness of our questions and our petty allegiances alienate us from the truth of God’s love. And our place in that love!
So Jesus doesn’t answer their question, but the question they should be asking: If we believe that our God, revealed as I AM is a living God who adores creation and hopes to reconcile everything, what do we do with the matter of death?
God doesn’t abandon us in death. A God of the living overcomes the finitude of death.
So the Sadducees are fixated on the part of the timeline in which particular humans live earthly lives. And Jesus is saying back to them: God is not limited to these finite timelines: God is a god of life, not death! Don’t put God into such a restrictive box!
Remember, they address him as a teacher. Then they ask him a dishonest question. But Jesus actually answers them like a teacher. Not the question they asked, but the one they would ask if they were open to hearing it.
And what happens?
Some of the scribes got it. But all the rest: the Pharisees, Sadducees, and scribes: they struck out.
The End Isn’t the End
An important question then remains: do we get it?
We get this interrogation of Jesus in early November, at a time when Christmas music starts to fill our shops, decorations begin to appear, and the makers of dinner and givers of gifts begin their holiday planning.
In a way, it seems odd to be in Jerusalem now, under the shadow of the cross. Isn’t that for Lent?
But it is also what we face in the waning weeks of the church year. We wrestle, not with the historical moment of the cross or Jesus’s crucifixion, but in the grander scheme, with God’s time. These last few weeks of the church calendar, which will tick off right after Thanksgiving into a new year with Advent, we are drawn into God’s time—and we are reminded of endings and beginnings, death and rebirth.
God draws us to these themes, not when the days are long, but as they shrink. Not when we are full of the joy of summer, but the cold stress of winter.
The Good News
And they come as a life preserver amidst the choppy waves. This is hope in the midst of pain and generosity in the midst of suffering. We need the Good News; it isn’t just something for the good times. It’s for all the times. The times when we need more than happiness or advice.
The Good News reminds us of the resurrecting and reconciling power of God in the midst of frustration and confusion; trial and challenge.
It reminds us that we are disciples of Jesus, whose way of love reveals the living God. In whom endings are not truly the end and we aren’t limited by the function of our bodies or the timespan of our churches.
So we are able to tap into the power and vitality of a great cloud of witnesses—not just for this time only, but for the many ages to come.
And we read the gospel as more than a rulebook and a history or a really good story about a nice dude who told people to be nice. The gospel reveals transformation, rebirth, new life, reconciliation. It reveals hope and thanksgiving when powerful people would try to silence us or condemn us.
God gives us the greatest gift of them all: new life. Not just an out from a dead end. But a new beginning. And a new home. A new parent and a whole community of siblings: of every gender, race, nationality, ability: the whole rainbow of humanity. And with it, a life of pure love, trust, and unending hope in the age to come.