Don't Mess With Jesus Where the Resurrection is Concerned

                This past Sunday, 11/10, we looked into Luke 20: 27-38.  We are late in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is in that part of his ministry that is leading to the cross.  And in this passage, the very heart of Jesus’ work is challenged.  One of the sects of the leadership in the time of the New Testament is identified as the Sadducees.  What marks them is a lack of belief in the resurrection.  Thus, they have come to challenge Jesus. 

                This chapter in Luke has been all about coming at Jesus.  The first part of the chapter has the leadership questioning Jesus’ authority, but he confounds their question and leaves them angry.  After a parable that “when the scribes and chief priests realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to lay hands on him at that very hour, but they feared the people.” (vs. 19-bold added)

                So they come at Jesus another way, trying to divide him from the support of the people.  It is the question of taxation.  Should they or should they not pay their taxes?  If Jesus says they should, he is a collaborator with the Romans and a traitor to the people.  If Jesus says they should not, he is preaching sedition and it is grounds for his arrest (which the leadership is seeking).  Jesus stumps them again with “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s”.

                Now the third round, the Sadducees have come to undercut his message.  And they are going to do so with a farce.  There is a provision in the Law of Moses that if the eldest son dies without an heir, his brother should marry the widow to produce a family for him.  This is because the land of Israel was holy to the Lord, and each portion within it.  Every year of Jubilee, there was a reset button.  Every real estate transaction was undone and each family reoccupied that portion of the Land that was given to them by God.  Since the heirship passed through the eldest child, marriage included a huge component of transactional necessity.  It was necessary to have an heir to carry on the family name.  Finding love in marriage, it was not an official part of the work.

                So the farce is this.  We rename the popular musical “One Bride for Seven Brothers”.  The oldest brother marries, dies without an heir, up to bat comes brother two.  Same thing happens.  It is a shut out all the way down the line, seven brothers, seven weddings, no heir, all die, then she dies too.  The direction of the conversation seems to lead into interpreting the Law of Moses concerning the inheritance of the land.  But that is not their intent.  They have come to make fun of Jesus.  “Whose wife is she in the resurrection?”

                Jesus’ response is one of anger and one that raises the stakes of the game considerably.  First he says IF someone is worthy of the resurrection, there is no marriage in heaven.  We are as the angels.  Given the transactional nature of marriage, in which women were basically units of worth, Jesus’ statement is revolutionary.  All are children of God in the resurrection.  All are equal in the resurrection and marriage, a relationship of power, no longer exists.  That is, if they even make it there-and the implication is that the Sadducees will not.  But then Jesus fights Moses with Moses.

                Not going to the section and subsections of the law, Jesus goes to the founding of Moses’ authority, when Moses stood before the Lord at the Burning Bush.  The very dirt he was standing on was made holy and Moses had to take off his sandals.  At that moment God is mentioned as the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, the patriarchs of the Israelites, an even more foundational authority than Moses.  And it is present tense, that they are alive and God is their God, because God is the God of the living. 

                So the Sadducees are pushed completely off their game.  They open the door to Moses as their authority for the farce they hope to perpetuate on the ministry and preaching of Jesus.  Jesus turns things around and slams the door on their lack of belief in the resurrection by the same authority they dared to appeal to.  And while the Gospel does not speak to this explicitly, I believe it is a fair assumption to think that the Sadducees joined the scribes and the high priests in their desire to lay hands on Jesus at that very moment.

Pastor Peter