Alive to God
Luke 20:27-38
November 6, 2022
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkPiQ46T5ZQ
The Sadducees don’t really care what Jesus thinks about resurrection. They don’t believe in it. Full stop. Their holy book was the Torah – the first five books of our Bible – which contains no mention of resurrection. Resurrection was just absurd. They didn’t want to hear Jesus’ deep thoughts on the subject. It was a question intended to trap him.
The question starts with the concept of Levirate marriage. Levir is a Latin word for brother-in-law. Men’s status in ancient Israel depended on producing heirs. If a man died without an heir, it was like he never existed. So if a man died before he had a son, his brother would marry his widow and the first son of their union was considered the dead man’s heir. The Sadducees come to Jesus with a hypothetical scenario in which a woman was married in turn by seven brothers who each died without leaving any children. They ask whose wife the woman will be in the after life. They take this practice of Levirate marriage to the extreme to show how absurd they think resurrection is.
This is the third in a series of public, trick questions posed by the authorities who want to put Jesus to death. Jesus doesn’t fall into the trap. He answers the question so skillfully that some of them even praise his answer. And after this, they ask no more questions.
What Jesus tells the Sadducees is that their categories are too small. They cannot begin to entertain the idea of resurrection because they are not willing to imagine the possibility of an existence that is radically different from what they currently know. Jesus cannot answer their question because marriage is not a meaningful category in the resurrection
Jesus rarely speaks of the after-life in the gospels. He tells a parable about a rich man and Lazarus. He says to the thief next to him on the cross that they will both be in Paradise together on that very day. And he calls himself the resurrection and the life when speaking to Martha after her brother died. It’s remarkably little to go on, even though some Christians may claim to know details about the “furnishings of heaven and the temperature of hell and the guest list of both places” as Reinhold Niebuhr once said.[1]
We might wish for more, but we will take what we can get. Resurrection mostly remains a mystery but there are at least two important hints about it in Jesus’ answer. He says that people do not marry in the age to come. A man’s earthly status depended on leaving an heir. A woman’s earthly status depended on being attached to a man. None of that will matter in the age to come.
As scholar Karoline Lewis puts it “it seems that the Kingdom of God has something more in mind than the patriarchy which imprisons women [and men] now. Women will not continue to be property. Women will not continue to be owned.”[2] In the fullness of God’s reign, God’s children are not bound or restricted by sex, sexuality, gender, power, status, marriage, or childbearing.
For those who have lived through violent or abusive marriages, the idea that in the resurrection we will neither marry nor be given in marriage may come as liberating good news. But for others, who have established faithful, loving and fulfilling partnerships, the idea that such marriages will end may be unthinkable.[3] It is very hard for us, like the Sadducees, to think beyond the categories we already know.
A woman was with her mother in the hospital. As her mother lay dying, the woman tried to reassure her.
She said, “Mom, in heaven, everyone we love is there.”
But her mother corrected her, saying “No, in heaven, I will love everyone who is there.” [4]
Do you hear the mother’s wisdom? It is not that the ones we already love are in heaven. It is that when we reach heaven, we know how to love anyone who is there.
I believe that in the age to come, we will love in ways too deep and compelling to understand now. Jesus’ first hint is that the world to come is not merely a continuation of the best of this one.
A second hint comes when Jesus points out that when Moses encountered God at the burning bush, God said “I AM the God the Abraham, and Isaac and Jacob.” Jesus interprets this in present tense. God is saying “I am their God now.” Not “I was their God when they were alive.” God is their God in the present tense because they are still alive to God. The relationship with God does not end when this body dies.
As the apostle Paul will write later “Nothing shall separate us from the love of God.” Not even death.
Resurrection is not just an abstract doctrine. Questions about resurrection are deeply personal, relational and meaningful. They are part of the wrenching pain of grief when someone we love dies and the fear that we may experience when we contemplate dying ourselves. These are questions which we cannot answer from reason or experience alone.
Death and resurrection are mystery. Many spiritual writers use birth as a way to think about death. That is the essence of a wonderful story Henri Nouwen told about twins having a conversation in the womb.
The sister said to her brother, “I believe there is life after birth.”
Her brother protested vehemently. “No, no, this is all there is. This is a dark and cozy place, and we have nothing else to do but cling to the cord that feeds us.”
The little girl insisted, “There must be something else, a place with light where there is freedom to move” She could not convince her twin brother.
After some silence, the sister said hesitantly, “I have something else to say and I'm afraid you won't believe that, either, but I think there is a mother!”
He shouted, “What are you talking about? I have never seen a mother and neither have you. Who put that idea into your head? This place is all we have . . . ."
The sister was quite overwhelmed. But she couldn't let go of her thought, and finally she said, “Don't you feel these squeezes every once in a while? They're quite unpleasant and sometimes even painful.”
“Yes,” he answered. “What's special about that”
“Well,” the sister said, “I think that these squeezes are there to get us ready for another place, much more beautiful than this, where we will see our mother face-to-face. Don't you think that's exciting?” [5]
If we can imagine birth as a transition between one kind of existence and another, might we also imagine death in a similar way? Just as the infant in the womb has no categories with which to understand life after birth, we have no idea what happens when the body dies.
Henri Nouwen said “We can live as if this life were all we had, as if death were absurd and we better not talk about it, or we can choose . . . to trust that death is the painful but blessed passage that will bring us face to face with our God.” [6]
Jesus did not teach much about death and resurrection with words, but he taught it with his actions. He kept on living his calling, kept on proclaiming the reign of God, until, not long after this, the earthly powers couldn’t take it any more and they killed him. Or we might say that Jesus entrusted his own life and death to the God of Abraham and Sarah.
And then, he became the resurrection. He returned in a body that people identified as his by its scars. They recognized him in his mannerisms, that particular way he had of breaking bread and of carrying on heart-stirring conversations. “He ate fish, broke bread, cooked breakfast. He also walked through locked doors and vanished while people were looking right at him. He was the same, but he was different, and because he was both, our futures may turn out to be as astounding as his.”[7]
Resurrection is not about our worthiness, but the power of God’s faithfulness and unspeakable love. God is God of the living, for all are alive to God. Thanks be to God.
[1] Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Volume 2: Human Destiny,(Hoboken: NJ, 1980) p. 294
[2] Karoline Lewis at https://www.workingpreacher.org/dear-working-preacher/who-says-theres-no-resurrection
[3] Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), pp. 389-90.
[4] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Grace (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p 367
[5] Henri Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), pp 19-20
[6] Henri Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift, p.20
[7] Barbara Brown Taylor, “God of the Living” in Home By Another Way (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1997) p. 207