A look at the gaps in the lectionary.
This week: the gap between
The text: Matthew 22:23-33
This week’s gap in the lectionary is another confrontation. This time by the Sadducees.
First, the temple leaders. Then the Pharisees’ disciples and some Herodians (followers of Kind Herod). Now, Sadducees.
And yet the point of the confrontation remains the same: discredit Jesus’s message and/or catch him in heresy. The overarching plan is to silence Jesus and his message for the same reason empires silence revolutionaries.
Stop the message. Because it can spread.
So, to kill the message, they have to stop the messenger from speaking.
The argument is the same.
Even if the subject claims to be different. The point is to discredit Jesus, so our getting too lost in the trap pulls us away from what is going on. Away from the purpose the Sadducees are asking it.
The gospel makes this abundantly clear…even if we find it all too tempting.
It reminds us that the Sadducees don’t believe in the resurrection. So they aren’t asking about something they have any interest in learning. Nor is this a test they are offering like a board of educators.
They are using a trap to try and get Jesus.
The Marriage Trap
Resurrection is the device the Sadducees are using to get at ownership laws in Torah. And do so with the same stuff in mind. Get Jesus to speak against the Law.
The fact that the Sadducees don’t believe in the resurrection shouldn’t be treated as novel. Nor should is it just hypocrisy. Hypocrisy isn’t a problem for the powerful. Getting away with hypocrisy is proof that you have power.
What the Sadducees are doing is trying to address their skepticism in Jesus by critiquing his approach. It has a kind of natural, modernist ring to it. It’s like sending an atheist at a theist—they have a different fidelity to the limits of one’s belief.
And the trap uses Levirate marriage to find the limits of Torah in the resurrection.
We have trouble seeing the trap.
Not because it’s clever, but because we are inclined to reason it out. The idea of a man being required to marry his brother’s wife is weird enough. But to do so for children, to complete a lineage, is just as foreign.
The Sadducees give Jesus several Hebrew laws to contend with at once, tangling them in a way that demands Jesus accept them—even when logic would make them paradoxical. [For us, it’s a bit like calling Jesus both God and Man.]
In this way, it doesn’t work as the most convincing of traps because it doesn’t seem like it would work. I suspect because we don’t think it’s as big a deal as, say, the separation of church and state.
But this is the view from within the trap. When we’re inside it, we’re at risk of forgetting what the trap is about: discrediting Jesus.
The Clever Answer
Jesus’s response to the line of inquiry is, once again, to not answer the question. I think it is critical for us to recognize that they are trying to trap Jesus through his answers to their questions.
So Jesus doesn’t answer their questions.
In each confrontation, Jesus does this differently. And in this one, he mocks them, calling them stupid.
The trap was dependent on the Law being the ordering structure in heaven. Which, all things being equal, would be a safe assumption. But it is that assumption that Jesus exploits to extract himself from the trap.
Jesus’s response to the Sadducees has a resonate consistency with his response last week to the disciples of the Pharisees and Herodians. In both cases, putting God’s way above our own forces us to reconsider the practices we are bound by in our context. Because God won’t have a need for them in the Kin-dom.
These aren’t universal laws.
Jesus isn’t teaching us here like we’re in a classroom and this is what’s most important to learn. It isn’t what’s going to be on the final.
He’s being confronted by scoundrels trying to trick him into discrediting himself. Or, if that doesn’t work, to say something that ties his own noose.
It is important to recognize that these come to us slant. Not as the stuff we should know, but as clues to Jesus’s way of thinking. How he responds to the Law and what God’s dream for creation really is.
This is important to remember as our lectionary has us skip a confrontation we probably don’t care about, but will read one this week that we do.