The time-bending love of the resurrection
Proper 27C | Luke 20:27-38
At first glance, this is a simple question about marriage and eternity. But that assessment would overlook the fact that we shouldn’t trust the people asking the question.
Two Sundays ago we were in chapter 18 of Luke, where Jesus was sharing parables about the Unjust Judge and the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. In both, we encountered questions of faith and persistence. These parables reflected the nature of God and our own willingness to engage with each other. And the next part of the story introduces the rich young ruler, who comes to Jesus, having done all the right things, kept all the commandments, served in every capacity — was a truly exemplary man. A living saint. And he wanted to be sure of his place in God’s eternity, the Dream for creation. And Jesus says the one thing he lacks: is lack. Give it all up and follow the Way of Love. The man runs away crying.
We didn’t get that story. But even if we had, we still jumped forward two chapters this morning from the middle of Luke 18 to the middle of Luke 20. And what we missed was the conclusion of the journey to Jerusalem, the triumphal entry we celebrate on Palm Sunday, his driving the money-changers out of the Temple, and the first teachings on the third day there. We have been plopped in the middle of a public inquisition of Jesus by people intending to trap him in blasphemy so they can have him executed.
This is a dishonest question!
Whether it has merit as a question is almost immaterial because it isn’t asked with the intention of getting an honest answer or getting to common understanding. It isn’t even asked for edification. It’s a trick; a distortion.
This is the sort of thing we see today in church apologetics and in the politics of self-styled debaters who clip their campus debates, talk really fast, and try to overwhelm people with bad faith arguments, unsubstantiated claims, unhistorical interpretations, and vapid insinuations about their opponents, that there is no time or room to contend with all they are saying. It is all fruit from the poison tree.
The question the Sadducees ask: who gets ownership of a widow in heaven when she has married multiple brothers: starts from three dishonest places.
- They want Jesus dead.
- Their refusal from the outset to ever be persuaded.
- They don’t want to listen or learn from him at all.
So before we even engage with the question and Jesus’s response to it, we have to frame the moment, not just in its context, but in its similarity to Jesus’s encounters with the people from his hometown and the Pharisees looking to have him killed. Moments in the gospel story when the people won’t listen. And when Jesus reminds his followers that the enmity of these people will close them off from the gospel and prevent them from hearing it.
Learning is paramount.
We might be tempted to give up on these people. To say they are lost causes. But we must recognize that that response is failing to follow Jesus’s third-way response. Rather than fight or flight (abandoning these people is flight — arguing with them is fighting) Jesus offers an alternative: to start from the recognition that the Sadducees aren’t listening, which means they are self-selecting out of the arrangement. We don’t have to reject or fight or abandon people who are choosing to not be with us. We can choose to stand up our way.
In other words, we can listen when others refuse to. And our listening to the Sadducees reveals their fear and mockery and anger and confusion. Which is so like the other Temple leaders who want the Hebrew people to reject Jesus’s Way of Love by first rejecting Jesus. By attacking him personally — seeking to silence him forever.
We can see this and see in Jesus another way. This is what the people see. Why the crowds that follow Jesus number in the thousands. Why these leaders who seek to humiliate Jesus all fail. Not just because they are acting in bad faith, but because the people can see it and learn anyway. We can learn anyway. The question is how. And that starts with Jesus’s response.
Jesus reframes the question.
The elementary nature of the question is that it is based in Levirate marriage. Hebrew Law was written to protect male legacy and female safety. So, if a man doesn’t have a son before he dies, his younger brother is supposed to give it a shot. Which is kind of gross if you think about it. But it’s even stranger because if it works, that man’s son isn’t really his son, because it becomes his dead brother’s son. So it is at the same time about laws and blood lines and also totally not.
And these faith leaders go to Jesus with the perfect thought experiment to test out that whole resurrection thing they don’t believe in. And it is a thought experiment that seems fair as long as you don’t actually think too hard. It is ultimately a conundrum with no “right” answer. A riddle. Like the old favorite: can God create a rock too heavy for God to lift. If you say “yes” then you accept the limitation of God and if you say “no” then you accept a different limitation of God. It’s a real “gotcha!” as long as you ignore the fact that it is a manufactured question geared to make the guesser lose 100% of the time because the real answer is that God has unlimited might and power. The limits are intentionally artificial.
Jesus exposes the artificiality of the question and all the assumptions it is based on.
The question he is essentially asking them is this: why do you think marriage laws supersede our commitment to God?
When it comes to God, our allegiance (and grace) is singular. It is God.
Then he reframes life itself.
For Jesus, the question of marriage was pedantic and stupid. It is too simple. It is focusing on the letter of the law without giving one second of attention to what it actually means. So his reframing it is about helping the crowds get that God’s love and purpose for humanity is not confined by the theoretical boundaries of vows and maintaining ledgers of who goes with whom in the afterlife. It is about as silly as writing the names on the plastic solo cups of all of the people invited to a birthday party and then needing to track down people’s addresses so you can send them their “property” after the party is over.
Of course, we don’t see our spouses as property, but Hebrew law does. And, until just a few decades ago when banks were finally forced to give credit to women, well . . . we still did. And children are still legally property. We just call them dependents. Nonetheless, the measure remains: maintaining the property logs into the afterlife seems important — until we think about it.
The same goes for life itself. The nature of living and dying. And Jesus reframes this, too.
The resurrection isn’t about God doing the old NES Konami Code and BAM you get thirty lives instead of one. It isn’t about the methodologies and explanations which invite us into a deeper obligation to the canonical order. It is about the life the laws intend to free us into.
The Sadducees obsess about bodies: flesh, bones, and circulatory systems. Jesus is reminding them that Moses can be with his people and be in the presence of the Patriarchs at the same time.
Resurrection bends time.
And we receive this exchange from the other side of the resurrection, give or take 2,000 years. We receive it, not with instructions, rules, laws that determine the proper way we shall understand the metaphysics of living and dying. But we receive a story. A story which shows some people taking the nature of life so literally, they can’t see past their own limited understanding. And we see Jesus inviting them (and us) to reach beyond our limitations. To see a bigger sense of life and death and new life.
There is something profound in Jesus’s declaration:
“Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive”
Not just because it’s a great line (it is!) but because all of our earthly obsessions are with our finitude, our struggles, expenses, weakness, the stuff of obsession and obligation and getting the whole blessed thing right! And Jesus reminds us that God isn’t the god of that, but of living. The point is what is alive in the here and now, all around you? God is the god of that.
Real living now.
That tingle that goes down the spine? That music that makes you sing? Sun that brings a smile to your face? Food that tastes better than you remember? There is more of God in that, more of God’s grace in that, love in that, joy in that, than in any law or tradition we obsess over and condemn people to protect.
God’s love and grace is for the living. And we’re all living. And when we’re done living? We live a new life. Of God. In God. With God.
There is so much freedom in this, friends. Freedom to love each other. To actually follow those commands — to love! Because it helps us live. And God is so excited when we live. Even more when we figure out how to help each other live more fully, creative, surprising lives of generosity and hope. When we share grace and give generously and love deeply. And commit to one another as we commit our own love to God. It is all so good. And when we let it all go and open ourselves to love like that? It’s like we’ve never felt so alive.