The practice described in our passage, of
brothers marrying their dead brother’s wife, is called “Levirate marriage,” and
it was common in the ancient middle east.
It was described in Deuteronomy and Genesis– our Old Testament – and
that’s what the Sadducees cite: “Teacher, Moses says that if a man’s brother
dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise
up children for his brother.” Sadducees
were a faction within Judaism that, as Luke puts it, said “there is no
resurrection.” The reason they said this
was that there is no mention of it in the Torah, the first five books of what Hebrew
scriptures, and the Sadducees held that they were the only books that counted. The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed
that the writings in the Torah were subject to ongoing interpretation,
particularly in light of writings like the Psalms and prophets. In particular, they accepted the book of
Daniel, which talks about the angels Gabriel and Michael, and has one of the
earliest mentions of the resurrection of the dead. So, as weird as it sounds, Jesus was aligned
with the Pharisees on this point.
The
Sadducees’ question comes just after Jesus gives an unassailable answer to another question, the one about the
paying taxes, and they try to spin it out
to absurd lengths, the better to embarrass him. “What if there were seven brothers” – and of
course, seven is a special number, the perfect number, and their question is
just that – perfectly ridiculous – “but just what if . . . the first brother
married, and then something happened, he got killed in a tragic bagel factory explosion
or something, and he died childless, then the second married her, and he fell
in a wine vat and drowned—childless again—and the third brother married
her, and guess what? he died
childless . . . and even after Ann Rule wrote a true crime novel about it (just
kidding) it went on and on until all seven had married her and all seven
had died childless, then in the resurrection” – and you can almost hear
the sneer in their voices – “in this resurrection you talk about, whose
wife will the woman be?”
And of course, they really don’t want to know
the answer – like a lot of religious folks, they think they already do . . . I
was reading a newsletter from John Spong—he’s an Episcopal Bishop who makes a
tidy living writing inflammatory books from a relentlessly modernist – not post-modernist,
as some claim – viewpoint, books with titles like “Born of a Woman: A Bishop
Rethinks the Virgin Birth . . .” and “Living in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality.” And one of the latest is: “Resurrection: Myth
or Reality? A Bishop Rethinks the
Origins of the Christian Faith,” and in this newsletter I read, he’s
complaining about Tom Wright, an Anglican Bishop who’s a biblical
scholar, and he’s running down Wright and getting pretty scornful about it, and
I’m thinking 2000 years later and we’re still doing this? It seems there will always be folks who’ve
already made up their minds on this issue, thank you very much, and on a host
of others besides . . .
But Jesus isn’t falling for it, he's not going
to guess how many angels can dance on
a pin, and responds to it by redefining it, by putting it into a
completely different light . . . he says that only those who “belong to this
age” marry and are given in marriage . . . marriage only matters now, in the
present age, not in “that” age, by which he means the kingdom of God, where the
dead have been resurrected . . . in that age, in the resurrection from the
dead, they’ll neither marry or be given in marriage . . . and why not? Because they cannot die anymore, they don’t
need to have sexual relations anymore, they’re like angels, they’re children of
God . . . and he doesn’t mean they have wings and haloes and flap around heaven
all day and night. What he means is that
those who belong to that age are immortal, and therefore they don't need
marriage anymore, they don't need to
replenish their numbers by establishing stable family units organized around a
sexual relationship. The folks in that
age live forever, they’re not decimated by famine or pestilence or war . . .
marriage is therefore an anachronism.
Now.
This may or may not strike you as fortunate . . . we’ve all got pet
theories about what it’s going to be like “after we die” . . . one song goes “I
don’t know, but I’ve been told, streets of heaven are paved with solid gold” .
. . some say that all the people we’ve ever loved will be there . . . others
that whatever you need to be happy will be there, if you need your little dog
fluffy, then there she’ll be . . . and I can imagine that to some folks, who’ve
been in committed, loving, relationships for a long time, this may sound
great. They love their
marriage, and wouldn’t want to it to be any other way, and the notion that
theirs might not exist in that age might be troubling.
On the other hand, those trapped in loveless
relationships might welcome being let off the hook . . . their idea of heaven
might be that they finally get out from under their abusive, controlling
spouses. But the point of our story is
not how it’s going to be different, but that it is . . . the new age,
where the dead are risen from the
dead, will not be the same old same old . . . Life after the resurrection –
whatever it is, whenever it is, however
it works – will not simply be a continuation of life before.
I think it’s a natural part of being human to
want to know how things are gonna be . . . we don’t like uncertainty very much,
so we pore over books and articles – and there are tons that have been
written on the subject, from deep scholarly tomes to light fluff that’s nothing
much more than wish fulfillment – but we pore over them nevertheless, and
though there’s nothing much wrong with it, think what would happen if we took
all the money we spent on it, all the time and energy worrying over it, and
plowed it back into mission? Into the service
of our risen Lord?
All I know is that if anybody tries to tell you
“this is the way it’s gonna be,” either at the second coming, or in the age to
come, you’d better check your wallets . . . And in truth, I think it best to
live with and recognize the mystery of the unknown, the mysterion as
it’s called in Greek . . . Paul likens life in this age to a childhood, where
we see in a mirror, dimly . . . but, he says, in the resurrection “we will see
face to face. Now I know only in part,”
he says, “then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
In our story, Jesus gives us just a little taste
of that mystery . . . he affirms that those who live in that age cannot die
anymore, that they are immortal. Like angels they are children of God. And he’s shown that the Sadducees’ argument
is based on a false notion – that the coming age is a continuation of the
present age – he proceeds to give a biblical argument for the resurrection,
using arguments from their own Hebrew bible: Didn’t God say to Moses “I am the
God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?” And we all know that God is the God of the
living, right? I mean, the dead can’t
have a God, can they? Because they’re dead
. . . thus, there must be a
resurrection, there must be
immortality of some kind. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, though they have
died, must be somehow alive, or about to be alive . . . And Jesus hoists the
religious authorities on their own petard.
He gives the Sadducees, who only believed in the first five books of
Moses, an argument from their own scripture.
And in so doing, he bests the cream of the
religious crop on their own turf . . . they’d come to him with an absurd
argument, designed to show him up as a piker, a hick from Galilee who lacked
any authority in scriptural matters. But
in the end, the joke’s on them . . . because at the end of the day, the only
authority left standing is Jesus himself.
Some scribes standing nearby – onlookers to the Sadducees’ humiliation –
say it outright, like a Greek chorus commenting on what just happened:
“Teacher,” they say, “you have spoken well.”
And nobody dares ask him any more embarrassing questions, for he’s
bested them all.
Like all these stories about Jesus answering
trick questions – and this was the third one in a row that Luke describes –
like all the stories, it shows Jesus as a master of debate, of the scholarly
riposté, a kind of super-rabbi who takes no prisoners. But it also tells us something about his
opponents as well . . . the Sadducees are so wrapped up in their argument, so
tied up in the ins and outs of levirate marriage, that they can’t see the new
age when it’s standing right there in front of their nose . . . for that’s
where it was, of course, personified as Jesus of Nazareth. They can’t see that God’s doing a new and transformative
thing, that there is a fundamental discontinuity between this age and the
next.
That’s why all our views on the resurrection
are – in the end – inadequate. We can’t
just take all the good things we know, raise them to the nth degree,
and expect that to be what the Kingdom of God is like . . . we can’t take
something we love here in this age – like cars or movies – and say that in the coming
age we’ll have thousands of cars or all the films ever made . . . it just isn’t
that way. In the age to come, in the
resurrection of the dead, all bets are off, God will do a new thing, and
there’s no getting around it.
But if this story is about discontinuity,
if it’s about the impossibility – and undesirability – of projecting all our
cares and worries and expectations upon the next age, one thing is
certain. God’s love will not be
frustrated, not even by death. It will
not be denied, even though all the forces of evil seem lined up against it,
though all the wars and rumors of wars, all the starvation, all the terrorist
attacks eat at our very souls, God will triumph. Even though we have no idea – really – of what
the Kingdom of God is now and will become, even though all we know is that it
will be different, one thing will never change: the eternal love of God. So be not afraid. Amen.
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