God of the Living
Matthew 22:28-33
May 1, 2022
Emmanuel Baptist Church; 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=SRLhxMd47ts
Easter comes around every year. The concept of resurrection, the idea that Jesus was all the way dead when God restored him to life, has been part of the story of Jesus for about 2000 years now. Even after all that time, it is not necessarily easy for us to understand or believe. Imagine how incredible that task must have been for Jesus’ first disciples.
Jesus was executed and everyone was in terrified shock. On Sunday morning, they discovered the empty tomb. Some of them had an encounter with Jesus and had their minds blown by the idea of resurrection. Others didn’t share that experience and couldn’t bring themselves to believe it, not at first anyway. But eventually, most of the inner circle disciples did see Jesus, even if only briefly, even if, like the two on the road to Emmaus, they didn’t recognize him at first.
Jesus was dead and gone . . . and then alive and present . . . and then gone again, back to God. As the disciples tried to make sense of it all, I imagine that they went back over everything Jesus had ever said about life or death or resurrection.
Surely they would have quickly remembered the conversation with the Sadducees that took place just a few days before Jesus’ death.
It was intended as a trick question. The Sadducees were a group within first-century Judaism who believed that this life was all there was. They followed the Torah with great earnestness and could not believe in resurrection because they could not find any scriptural support for it. In contrast, the Pharisees were the more liberal group who were more likely to accept the idea of life after death that was developing at that time. The Pharisees and Sadducees operated from different power bases and were kind of each other’s out-group. So, the question that the Sadducees ask is sarcastic and mocking of Jesus and the Pharisees for believing resurrection.
The question is based on the custom of levirate marriage or brother-in-law marriage. If a man died before having children, then his brother had an obligation to marry the first man’s widow. This was intended primarily to provide heirs for the dead man, but it also provided some protection for a woman who had no husband and no children to care for her in old age. So, the Sadducees push the rule of levirate marriage to absurdity. They ask a hypothetical question. They say, “What if a man died without children and each of his 6 brothers married her in order and each of them died, also without having children —Jesus, when the resurrection happens, whose wife is will she be?”
This ridiculous question is intended to discredit Jesus. If he answers that a particular brother will be her husband in the resurrection, that doesn’t work, because each brother had equal claim on her during their earthly marriage. If he says that she will be the wife of all seven, that makes even less sense. So, perhaps they were hoping that Jesus would see the error of his ways. Maybe they thought he would throw up his hands and say “You got me. I can’t answer your hypothetical question. The whole idea of resurrection is preposterous.”[1]
Of course, Jesus doesn’t do that. He refuses to engage with their absurd hypothetical. He says “you just don’t get it. Your categories are all wrong.”
They want to know to whom the woman will belong in heaven, which of her earthly husbands will have control of her there. They cannot imagine resurrection as anything more than a continuation of life as it is on earth.
What the disciples begin to understand after Easter, is what Jesus has been teaching them all along about the nature of power. Resurrection power is not just life-preserving. It is also life-transforming. In the resurrection, Jesus was saying, women will not be given away as if they are property. In the resurrection, they will be persons, just as men are persons.
Resurrection does not lead to more of the same. Resurrection is a shift to something completely new. The resurrection of Jesus is the event from God’s future breaking into the present. Resurrection transforms life as we know it. It marks the end of the oppression of women, for starters, but also the end of all oppression. It ends of the power of death itself, death in all its forms.[2]
This was hard for people to understand. It’s not necessarily any easier for us to understand now. We are so well acquainted with death and fear and suffering and oppression.
Conceiving of an existence without them is beyond us most of the time.
Mark Twain said “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
It seems to me that much of Jesus’ teaching was aimed at refocusing the disciples’ imagination.
John Senior is a professor at Wake Forest Divinity School. He writes “There is nothing wrong with making sense of life from within the human perspective. . . . The mistake, however, is to insist that all that life can mean is contained within the horizon of our of own experience. . . . There is profoundly more to life than just the human experience of it, even if that means we cannot wrap our heads around it. Death is not an ultimate condition for Christians, and it does not permanently bind the experience of life, and meaning.”[3]
Every Easter, we tell the story of resurrection. It’s a story about a different kind of power, a story that turns our experience inside out and right-side-up. It’s so hard to comprehend that we tell it over and over again, refocusing our imagination a little more each time.
When the Sadducees struggle with this, Jesus sends them back to the scriptures. He says “Haven’t you read that God is the God of the living?” They know and trust the Bible. It is a key part of their human experience. So he invites them to read it again, with eyes and ears focused by a new imagination.
Our call to worship was from Psalm 78. It speaks of teaching the next generation that which is life-giving. The story of Jesus, the story of Easter is life-giving and we keep on telling it to the next generation. We keep in mind that God is the God of the living. God is alive and in our midst. Resurrection is not just more of the same. God was never bound by first century ideas about marriage where women were property. Neither is God constrained by the human experience of the twentieth century or of the twenty-first. God is the God of the living.
A few of us attended the Alliance of Baptists gathering on-line last week. There we heard a sermon offered in dialogue between two pastors, Russ and John. The focus of this gathering was on understanding the cross. In their sermon, John and Russ looked back on how their own theology of the cross had changed.
They recalled an event from 25 years ago. It was at another Baptist gathering. At that time, they sat and talked after their children had gone to bed. The gathering was in a hotel. They each sat in the threshold of their hotel rooms, where they were near to their sleeping children in case they were needed. In that space, across the hall from each other, they talked about things that they had been taught that were no longer life-giving. They were committed Christians, already pastors even, but they were re-evaluating everything. Today we would say that they were deconstructing their theology, but I’m not sure that word was trendy then. They did not yet have language for the understandings which were emerging, but together they were refocusing each other’s imaginations. In the sermon offered to us, they remarked that the children who had been asleep in the hotel rooms are now adults. As they looked back, what Russ and John hoped was that the theology they passed on to the next generation was more life-giving, less death-dealing, than the one they had inherited, the one they had to dismantle.
“Behold! I am doing a new thing” God says through the prophet Isaiah. In resurrection, the future has broken into the present. Heaven and earth are joined together. May it be so for you and for me.
[1] Thomas G. Long, Matthew: The Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997), p. 252
[2] J. Peter Holmes, in Feasting on the Gospels, Luke, Volume 2, Cynthia Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson, editors, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2014), p.210-11.
[3] John E. Senior, in Feasting on the Gospels, Luke, Volume 2, Cynthia Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson, editors, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2014), p.209-210