Tricky
Questions, Life-Giving Answers
Luke 20:27-40
While
growing up, I had a close friend named Keith.
Keith was my age and we were in the same Sunday School classes at
church. We both had strong spiritual leanings,
but we also had active, inquiring minds.
There was no Sunday School teacher and no adult in a position of
authority who could feel safe from the cross examination that was likely to
take place when they appeared in our class room. It shouldn’t have been a surprise what
happened that Sunday morning when we were in the Seventh Grade and they
entrusted our class to a well-intentioned sixteen year-old girl to teach
us. She wasn’t prepared for the intensive
grilling she would receive from her “know-it-all” students when she insisted
that Jesus turned the water into “unfermented wine.” When we challenged her, we did so with such enthusiasm
that she fled from the room in tears. We
weren’t quite sure what we did wrong.
That was the last time that the sixteen year-old girl taught our
class. If I remember correctly, she was
replaced by the retired grandfather of another kid in the class.
Little
did I know at the time that our Socratic style of interrogating our teacher was
nothing new. Jesus faced such
interrogations himself on multiple occasions.
Our Gospel Lesson this morning records one of them.
We
often talk about the Pharisees—the Gospels mention them frequently. We don’t hear about the Sadducees so
often. It is hard to compare them to any
group in our society today. In the
religious circles of Jesus’ day, the Sadducees represented the high priesthood,
the aristocracy of the religious establishment.
In order to make it to the inner circle of the highest levels within the
Temple order, you had to be a priest, born of the House of Aaron.[2] There seems to have been a certain “air”
among the Sadducees.
Our
Lesson this morning takes place after Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem, riding
into town on a borrowed donkey, amid the palm branches and the hosannas. Jesus has been teaching in the Temple. The chief priests and scribes had taken their
best shot to stump Jesus and they had failed.
The Pharisees also had tried to stop Jesus, but without success. On this particular day, the Sadducees decided
to try.
They
came to Jesus with a question—not a sincere, truth-seeking question, but with
an absurd hypothetical question. Most
Jews those days knew that the Sadducees did not believe in any notion of
resurrection, so when they asked this long-winded question about resurrection,
Jesus knew that they were trying to set a trap.
A
man who was one of seven brothers dies, leaving a childless widow. Under the law of Moses, it was the duty of
the next eldest brother to take the widow in marriage to perpetuate the name
and family of the older brother. Any
children born of the second marriage would be treated as if the first husband
was the father. Those children would
stand in line to inherit the estate. You
can read about this practice, known as “levirate marriage,” in Deuteronomy 25:5-10.
Now
in this hypothetical question, one after another of those brothers died, still
childless, and the next brother does his duty and marries the unlucky widow. None of these marriages produces a child. (I’m not sure who would worry more about this
practice—the widow or the youngest brother.)
The questioner then asks, in the world to come, whose wife would the
woman be? (Luke 20:29-33).
It’s
an absurd question. It’s not a question
that was grounded in reality, in a real world quest to find meaning and
truth. It is a question in which smart
men were trying to outsmart Jesus. It is
the sort of question that Jesus very well could have ignored. In their question, the Sadducees were really
trying to press their own case that there was no such thing as resurrection.
It
was clear to Jesus that this hypothetical question was a thinly-veiled attempt
to pigeonhole Jesus into an ideological or theological category, but Jesus
refused to be categorized. He did point
out that that resurrection was inherent even the Torah’s story of Moses and the
burning bush—the Sadducees could not quarrel with Jesus here, within their own
frame of reference. Jesus then made his
real point: the Sadducees were so caught
up in an earthly understanding of resurrection that they missed entirely the
promise of life, of eternal life in the spirit, that God offers. God is the God of the living and not of the
dead.
The
scripture tells us that some of the scribes congratulated Jesus on his
response: “Teacher, you have spoken
well” (Luke 20:39). Although not everyone was convinced, Jesus
seems to have quieted the Sadducees questions, at least on that day. I suspect that Jesus knew that logic would
not have persuaded the Sadducees who were out to trick Him. The Sadducees were not looking for truth;
they were looking for someone to agree with their own preconceived
notions. They were not seeking pastoral
care or advice on issues of life and death; they were seeking a pretext to
arrest Jesus.
Had
they been looking for direction on how to find eternal life, they would have
heard Jesus point them to the commandments, then invite them to let go of their
possessions that actually possessed them, and to follow Him (Luke 18:18-25).
Had
they been seeking, as did Nicodemus at night, the secret of being born anew
into the life of the spirit, they would have heard the assurance that “God so
loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him
may not perish but have eternal life” (John
3:16).
Had they been looking for
comfort in the face of death, they would have heard Jesus proclaim, “I am the
resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will
live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25-26a). “I go to prepare a
place for you… I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I
am, there you may be also” (John 14:2-3).
Instead,
they tried to put Jesus into a corner with their trick questions. Even so, under the glare of their
questions, Jesus responded with words of life, taking the opportunity to affirm
that God “is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them—Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob—are not dead but alive” (Luke
20:38).
By
their question, the Sadducees demonstrated that they really didn’t understand
what Jesus was talking about. They were
asking an earthly question about a marriage as they knew it and an ancient
custom that was created to solve an earthly
dilemma. Jesus responded to their
question by talking about life—but not just ordinary life. There are two words in Greek that are
translated as “life” but they have very different connotations. The first one is the word from which we get
our word biology. It means physical,
biological life. The Sadducees seemed to
assume that resurrection meant an extension of physical, biological life with
its various customs. Jesus responds,
however, by speaking about ζωὴ, about
spiritual life—life that may begin as natural, physical life but into
which God breathes the breath of life and we become living souls. This is the eternal life to which Jesus
invites us (John 3:16). This is the abundant life that Jesus offers
to us (John 10:10). This is the life Jesus was speaking about
when Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.
Whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will
never be thirsty” (John 6:35).
So
often, we come to Jesus with questions about life and death and what lies
beyond. Jesus doesn’t mind our
questions. He understands our questions. But he doesn’t want us to seek the “living
among the dead” (Luke 24:5). He responds to us with life, with bread, with
himself, the “bread of life”.
As we come to the Table
this morning, Christ invites us to come with our questions. But let us come seeking life—the life that
Christ offers to us freely. For God
offers to us a choice: “This day I call heaven and earth
as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings
and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that
you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him” (Deuteronomy 30:19-20, NIV).
May it
be so!
Copyright
© 2013 by Thomas E. Frost. All rights
reserved.
[1] Preached at Cunningham
United Methodist Church in Palmyra, Virginia.
[2] See Daniel R. Schwartz,
“Jewish Movements of the New Testament Period” in Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi
Brettler, eds., The Jewish Annotated New
Testament: New Revised Standard Version
Bible Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 526 at 527.
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