Luke 20:27-38
At the end of his debate with the Sadducees, Jesus makes a very clear declaration about God and God’s relationship with his children:
Now he is God not of the dead but of the living for to him all of them are alive
The Sadducees have a question for Jesus about living arrangements in the hereafter. They construct an unlikely but not impossible situation. Seven brothers, in the interests of carrying on the family name marry the same woman one
after another. But in the end they all die childless. But that would leave a problem: In the resurrection, whose wife will she be? Now for the scribes and teachers of the law in Jesus’ day this is not such an odd sort of question. It was with this sort of question, these possible but highly contrived and extreme situations that they tested the Law. It was how they did the process of figuring out what the Bible means and what God required of his people. It just seems a really odd sort of question to us, because we don’t read the Bible that way. Though just now and again, when we’ve got nothing better to do, that sort of question might pop into our heads. I can see a connection between the Sadducees’ question and some of the ways we might worry about what the hereafter may be like. We might wonder as we say farewell to our loved ones whether it is true to say, as we often do at funerals, that they have been reunited with other loved ones who had already passed on. The renowned Swiss theologian Karl Barth, apparently was once asked by someone, “Will I see my loved ones in the kingdom of heaven.” Barth is supposed to have offered the somewhat alarming repsonse: “Yes, and everyone you hate!” I guess we all sometimes wonder what it’s going to be like. And in the end have to leave of the question with the thought that we will simply have to wait and see.
The truth is though, the question that the Sadducees pose is not an honest one. Nor is it as it first appears a question about how things will be arranged for us in the resurrection. The truth is the Sadducees don’t care about the answer to that question. If we know one thing about the Sadducees, and Luke reminds us in his telling of the story, is that they don’t believe there is a resurrection. My granddad used to make a rather lame pun: “Why are the Sadducees called the Sadducees? Well they don’t believe in the resurrection so they were sad, you see!” They really don’t care what might happen to those seven unfortunate brothers and their no doubt exhausted wife, because as far as the Sadducees are concerned the situation would never arise. Which is kind of their point. Their question is not about what the resurrection will be like. But whether there’s a resurrection at all. What they are saying is: Since Moses makes this arrangement for childless widows to marry their husband’s brother in order to keep the family name alive among the people of God: Firstly there can be no resurrection because it creates a ridiculous situation, and more importantly the arrangement would be redundant if there is a resurrection since the brothers would live on among the people of God whether they raised up children or not. Therefore the Sadducees assert there can be no resurrection. The real question that they are asking Jesus is: do you believe there is a hereafter?
The question of what happens to us when we die in the end becomes hard to avoid. Whether or not there is a resurrection is a question that is not easy to dismiss. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard put it like this, he said human nature is “mortality flung against eternity” What he means is that sadly we are all too painfully aware that human beings die. The span of our lives is limited and will always end in death. But at the same time human beings are also aware that time and existence stretch on indefinitely both before we arrived and after we are. That creates a tension in human life, we are here now, but where are we in all the rest of eternity that we are also aware of? That question was framed by the Jews of Jesus’ day as a question about the resurrection. “Will the people of God rise to life in that everlasting. . . . or not?” It would perhaps be morbid to be dwelling on that question all the time. But there is no denying that sooner or later it occurs to us all. I know I’m here now, and I know that one day I will die, what will happen to me over that horizon over which I cannot look?
That question is impossible to answer. Death really is a horizon over which we cannot look. Which presents us with the real difficulty of the question of the resurrection. We can’t actually answer it. At least not with the knowledge and the techniques that we use to answer all the other question that we might have. All our physics, and chemistry and biology run out of answers at the limit of death. All we can say is that at death the physics and the chemistry and the biology stop. Even if we switch the question to say philosophy or psychology or sociology or whatever-ology our ability to answer questions runs out the same point. Death is the horizon over which we cannot look with our normal ways of looking at things. But we are also aware that we are more than physics, chemistry and biology. We are aware of ourselves in a way that no science can explain. There is something more to us than those processes. And it is about that something more, that something makes us truly ourselves, that that question gets asked. What happens to the left over, which actually is the only bit that really matters?
To pose this question at all takes us beyond science, or even philosophy. It takes us into the realms of religion. One way or another all religions attempt to offer human beings an answer to that unavoidable question. The Sadducees’ religion answered the question with a simple “nothing.” The end that is death is the end. But Jesus is careful point out to them, using sources that they and all Jews, and all Christians subsequently, agree is authoritative that they are wrong. Jesus looks to Moses’ story and the voice of God that speaks from the burning bush. And Jesus points out that when God speaks about himself, he speaks of himself as the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob, in the present tense. Though the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had all died long before Moses was born and more than a millennium before any Sadducee was born, God still speaks of those who are dead to us as alive to him.
We started this last week with All Saints Day (if we bothered with it) when the Church remembers all those who though dead to us, are alive to God. Jesus points the Sadducees and us to the answer to our question. And the answer to our question about what happens to us when we die is found in what we believe to be true about God! Despite what we sometimes think and even say Christians don’t actually believe in immortality. That probably comes as a bit of shock. We don’t believe in immortality, we believe in the resurrection. Whilst that may seem like playing with words there is an importance difference. Immortality would imply that there is something inherently everlasting in human nature. That we we automatically will go on for ever and ever. But perhaps the thing that science: physics and chemistry and biology and psychology and sociology and whatever, does demonstrate is that that is probably not the case. We do just come to an end and dissolve and disappear with nothing left over. But that is not what we believe to be true because God is not the God of the dead but of the living. Those who are dead, as Jesus points out, are alive to God because he makes them so. Our destiny after we die doesn’t depend on us or on our human nature it depends on the nature of God. And one thing that comes through loud and clear through the whole testimony of the Bible
and of the record of the experience of faithful people is the extraordinary lengths to which God will go to be with his people. No amount of rejection and refusal will ever put God off from reaching out. Even at the cost of coming to us in person, even at the cost of death itself, God wants to sustain a relationship with us. God refuses to let anything not even our death end our relationship with him. Death is the horizon over which we cannot look, but what can say about what lies on the other side is that God will not have allowed the relationship to have come to an end. That is the resurrection. Eternal life is now. There is a hymn whose first line is: “Now is eternal life” which seems a bit odd. All this talk of what happens after we die actually can seem a bit redundant. Most people most of the time simply ignore the question. Postpone it until it seems more urgent. After all what difference does it really make here and now to our everyday life. Actually it makes all the difference in the world what we think will happen to us after we die. And the story the Sadducees made up makes the point. In the family tragedy that is played out as one brother after another marries the same wife without ever producing the child that will carry the family name into the future that lies beyond the span of their own years. The underlying assumption is that the child is necessary. That without the child the family will lose its presence among the people of God. The family makes a desperate effort to secure its place in eternity and tragically their efforts are futile and they fail. But it was their belief or rather their lack of belief in resurrection that drove them to such disappointment. Perhaps so much of the behaviour that we might observe around us comes down to same motive. Aware of both mortality and eternity people try desperately to do something about it. Their belief makes all the difference to who they are and what they do. But the gracious God who makes alive the dead takes such anxiety away from us. Eternity is not down to us, it is God’s gift. Which is a liberating knowledge. It frees us from the tyranny of trying to succeed and the possibility of failure. Instead God sets us free to be faithful. To live out a vision of that eternal life now.
Amen.
The Sadducees’ Question by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0