Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
November 11, 2007
Haggai 1:15b-2:9
Psalm 98
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38
Over the span of my adult life, I have been asked a lot of questions about my faith and my religious practices as a follower of Christ. Some people have asked me questions out of mere curiosity. Others asked questions out of a real desire to know something or to learn. Then there were those who asked me questions out of profound doubt which often reflected a desperate need to believe in something or someone greater than themselves. Now, I love it when people ask me questions—even if I don’t know the answers, because that gives me the opportunity to learn something new, or to refresh my memory about knowledge which has faded or become fuzzy. But there is one kind of question I never appreciated being asked. It is a question which seems to me to be disingenuous. A question which is intended to stump me, or humiliate me or make me look foolish. What I have come to realize is that such a question is not about the question or the answer. It is about the a person’s desire to use the question as tool of manipulation or a weapon of limited destruction.
Anyone who reads their bible, listens to sermons, or who participates in bible studies based on gospel texts knows that Jesus was always being asked such questions, mostly by the so-called religious authorities of his day whose intent was to try to trip him up in order to discredit his ministry. The Pharisees have dominated our scripture lessons during this season of Pentecost. They have challenged Jesus with questions in public places where all who were gathered could witness his demise. But as we well know, that never happens. Jesus responds to their questions in ways which reveals their insincere motives, while at the same time he teaches profound lessons which show us who God is and who God yearns for us to be. The Pharisees always depart from Jesus, grumbling and feeling not a little humiliated, and you get the sense that they can’t wait for another opportunity to question his teaching and challenge his authority.
In today’s gospel account, however, Jesus finds himself questioned by the other, lesser known, Jewish sect called the Sadducees who not only set themselves apart from the Pharisees, but who are also despised by them. Of course, what Pharisees think about Sadducees matters little or nothing to them. Sadducees are well-educated, upper class Jews who own lucrative businesses or they hold well-paying positions in the employ of the Roman government. This is more than enough reason for the Pharisees to despise them, but Sadducees also depart from important Jewish beliefs and practices. For instance, Sadducees base their religious beliefs and practices only on Torah, the first five books of the bible. That means that they do not honor, or subscribe to newer insights about God and newer religious practices which evolve over time. For example, there is little speculation about an afterlife in the Torah. Heaven is God’s domain; God’s judgment and the redemption of his people are meant to take place in this life, on this earth. It isn’t until the book of Daniel, complied late in Jewish history, that redemption becomes possible through resurrection. Even so, it remains unclear in Jewish scripture what resurrection means and how it is to be accomplished in Jewish until a theology of resurrection takes root in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.
By the time of Jesus, Sadducees have long been an established sect of Judaism. Their beliefs and practices are rigidly rooted in the Torah. And they aren’t buying into resurrection from the dead. They aren’t buying anything about this notion of ascension of the body into heaven or anything that accompanies it including the belief in angels, those heavenly creatures who visit us on this earth and accompany us to our heavenly home. Not to say that Sadducees aren’t curious about it, but when they try to conjure what might happen in bodily resurrection they can only imagine a kind of bodily resuscitation which extends the life we live on this earth into an afterlife. In the end, Sadducees think the whole concept of bodily resurrection is downright silly. We should not be surprised, then, that Sadducees simply dismiss both the Pharisees and Jesus for their silly beliefs.
Nevertheless, now that Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem the Sadducees, who live in large number in Jerusalem, are beginning to look at Jesus with mock curiosity. They have seen his popularity grow, and they can’t imagine why anyone would pay attention to him. They are not going to take him seriously. On the other hand, they see an opportunity to make sport of him. They see Jesus as someone who will play a kind of theological game of tennis with them. They get to throw the question up in the air and then bat it around with him. They don’t really care if they win or lose; they just want to have some fun. And while they’re at it, they’d like to expose their opponent for who he is, not by asking him a serious question as a Pharisee would, but by asking him a silly one. A question which has no importance for them at all. A question which is meant to provoke Jesus to address his silly beliefs so that they can make him look foolish. And so, in today’s gospel account, Jesus is asked one of the silliest questions in all of scripture.
The question is based on one of the laws of Torah, found in the book of Deuteronomy. As I have mentioned at other times in my sermons, women in ancient biblical times were nobody and they owned nothing, not even their own life. A woman was only valued and protected by the men in her life. A woman was nobody without a father and a husband and a son. The Law commanded that if a woman’s husband died, her husband’s brother was to marry her to assure the family of a male offspring. So the Sadducees ask a question based on this Jewish law which they believe will expose the silliness of bodily resurrection. They toss the ball into the air and ask Jesus, if a woman outlives her husband and all his brothers, which one will she be married to when she dies and goes to heaven? Well, Jesus returns the ball, and these Sadducees quickly realize that Jesus doesn’t play tennis for fun of it; he plays to win. There is not going to be any batting around this question. The Sadducees will be given no opportunity to return the ball. Jesus answers their silly question with a profound understanding of resurrection which clearly states the difference between the rules of our earthly life, and the promises of heaven.
Like any adept person who is being tested by a question, Jesus turns the question into his answer. He tells these Sadducees that it is only in this world that women and men are given in marriage; that marriage as we know it on this earth does not continue as we know it in heaven. Jesus refutes the Sadducees’ silly notion that resurrection must be about resuscitating the body so that after it dies it can continue on to live the same life in another place. Jesus tells the Sadducees that resurrection is about dying to our old life and taking on our new life; it is about the earthly body being transformed into its heavenly body. (Later on, in his epistles, the apostle Paul will clarify Jesus’ notion of resurrection as an earthly body taking on her spiritual body.) Jesus makes it clear that there is no need to be married in heaven. Immortal beings do not need to reproduce; they do not need laws and rules to protect them or to guarantee their posterity. But Jesus doesn’t stop here; he nails down his claim for life everlasting in resurrection by referencing Torah itself. He tells the Sadducees, “The fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” End of game. Final score Love-40. The Sadducees walk off the court, humiliated by their own silliness.
Well, I wish I were as adept at answering questions the Pharisees and Sadducees of our time continue to ask me. I wish I could be as patient as Jesus is with them because I know my response to people who ask me disingenuous and insincere questions is not likely to make any difference to them. Even so, I wish, like Jesus, I could take the deceitfulness of the Pharisees and the arrogance of the Sadducees and turn them into profound statements of faith which demonstrate not only what I believe, but how my beliefs inform the way I live my life. But I am not Jesus. Like you, I am a pilgrim on a journey which is leading me to God. A journey which continues to deepen my awareness of my baptismal covenant as I try to live my life in Christ. Like you, I have questions of my own. Good questions, I think, for the most part. Honest questions. Questions that allow for my doubts and fears. And questions which demonstrate the strength of my faith and my growing knowledge and experience of God. I am sure your questions have been much like mine.
Nevertheless, if I am honest, I have to admit that there have been times when my questions sounded much like the questions of Pharisees and Sadducees. I have had those moments in my life when, like the Pharisee, my intent was to challenge God and manipulate him into seeing things my way. To get him to see my truth, and to make him agree to my way of thinking about him and believing in him, and to get him to sanction my way of living my life. Even worse are those times when I approached God with the questions of a Sadducee. Times when I framed my questions in mock disbelief that this God would want me to believe something unbelievable, that he wanted me to think something that was unthinkable, that he wanted me to live a life in this world which was not livable. Like the Sadducees I kept turning away from such a foolish God.
But here I am. And here you are. And the fact that we have come to this place to worship this seemingly difficult and foolish God tells me that somehow we kept asking our questions until we were ready to hear and believe the answers. Somehow we came to realize that the answers we needed to hear came from a living God who kept inviting us to live into his promises of resurrection, right here, right now, in this life. So that we might begin our life of transformation and establish ourselves in new and life-giving relationship with each other and with our world. I have come to believe that it is not necessarily a bad thing to challenge our God, or each other, with the hard or silly questions of a Pharisee or a Sadducee. Only if we stubbornly, or foolishly insist on walking away from the answers.