Tag: Sadducees

Holy Week Meditations: Jesus Under Question. The Resurrection and Marriage (3/3)

Luke 20:27-40

The opponents

When our daughter was at secondary school, she acted in a school production of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Rhoda McGaw Theatre in Woking. Debbie and I managed to see the production twice, having snagged tickets both for the preview night as well as the final show on the Saturday night. 

Seeing it twice alerted me to something I hadn’t noticed before. The theology in it is dreadful! Firstly, all reference to God is excised from the story. The key line in the Genesis account that what Joseph’s brothers meant for evil purposes, God meant for good, is not even hinted at. And secondly, the very title of the song One More Angel In Heaven gives away their failure to understand a book, Genesis, that has no direct reference to the afterlife.

Welcome to the world of the Sadducees, the latest group to interrogate Jesus in the temple and try to catch him out. They only accepted the Torah, or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, as Holy Scripture, and since none of these books contained any direct reference to resurrection, they didn’t believe in it. Resurrection only gets a name-check in the Old Testament in the book of Daniel, and possibly Job. But to the Sadducees, these books weren’t scripture, whereas to the Pharisees and other groups they were – hence why the teachers of the law in this passage actually side with Jesus!

The other thing to appreciate about the Sadducees is that they were the aristocracy. They were wealthy and well-to-do, and exercised influence in Jerusalem. While they were not strictly part of the temple authorities, you can be sure that their money talked in the holy city. 

And like the religious leaders, they cosied up closely to the Romans. Doing so protected their wealth. For a rough parallel, think of Russian oligarchs keeping quiet to avoid the wrath of Vladimir Putin. Therefore, if Jesus’ good news of the kingdom of God was a threat to the Jewish powers that be in Jerusalem because it undermined the Roman Empire, it was also a threat to the Sadducees with their closeness to and dependence upon Rome. We are dealing with another unholy alliance of power. It is to their advantage to neutralise Jesus.

The issue

For Israel, Moses was the central and most important figure in their history. He led them from slavery in Egypt to the cusp of the Promised Land. He received the law from God on Mount Sinai. And the Sadducees, as I said, limited themselves in terms of biblical authority to those first five books of the Bible that were sometimes popularly known as ‘The Five Books of Moses’ (even though he didn’t appear in the first one, Genesis). So if Moses said something, it was very important. 

With their laser focus on Moses, they thought they could ridicule Jesus. And I say ‘ridicule’, because here is one of those times when it is important to see this story in its Holy Week context and the context of the two previous episodes we have considered in this chapter. If this story had existed somewhere else, the question the Sadducees pose could have been construed as an innocent enquiry. But the context in Luke’s Gospel demands that we see this too as an attempt to trap Jesus. 

What they try to do with their elaborate story is to say to Jesus, you believe in resurrection, but the teaching of Moses contradicts you. Their story about the woman who marries seven different brothers one by one is based on an Old Testament law of what came to be known as ‘levirate marriage.’ It was important to have offspring. Therefore, if a man died without having fathered children, it was his brother’s duty to marry the widow and have children that would be his heritage. It is like the popular modern belief that after death we live on through our descendants. The secular celebrant who conducted Miriam King’s funeral on Monday said something like that as she tried vainly to offer hope to her family and all at the funeral who were mourning. This view is called ‘immortality through posterity’, and what the Sadducees claim here is that the law of levirate marriage depends on it, and therefore the belief of Jesus (and others) in the resurrection is wrong and unscriptural. 

As far as the Sadducees are concerned, it’s game, set, and match to them. They reckon they have silenced Jesus in the way he has silenced others. How wrong they are. 

The response

Jesus’ response comes in two halves. The first is about how you understand Scripture. The second is specifically about the Sadducees’ hero, Moses. 

As to his understanding of Scripture, he talks about why marriage is not needed in the life to come. But before we get to that, I would just like you to see in passing a little detail that will take us off piste for a tangent, but which is a piece of incidental evidence for Jesus’ more positive view of women. It’s the way he refers to people who ‘marry and are given in marriage’, in English translations. We might read in there with the language of being ‘given in marriage’ the old custom of a bride being ‘given away’ by her father, as if her ownership is being transferred from him to the bridegroom. It’s something that is modified in the current Methodist marriage service so that the language speaks not of ‘Who gives this woman to be married to this man?’ but ‘Who presents this woman to be married to this man?’ (And it gives an opportunity for the man to be presented to the woman, not that I have ever had a couple avail themselves of that opportunity.)

However, the English translations let us down at this point. You might think that something translated ‘given in marriage’ was in the passive voice, but in the Greek it’s in a grammatical construction called the middle voice, and it should be rendered ‘those who allow themselves to be married.’ In other words, Jesus is allowing for women to have agency in the question of marriage, an utterly revolutionary thought in his day, and until relatively recently in our culture, too. 

That said, now let’s return to why Jesus says that marriage is not needed in the life of the age to come. He says that once death is abolished, there is no more need for people to have children. No more will dead people have to be replaced by the births of babies. Therefore, their extreme account of levirate marriage doesn’t stand up.

And why doesn’t it stand up? Because of what Christians call ‘eschatology’, that is the doctrine of the last things. The ‘eschaton’ is the age to come. In Christian terms, that is subjects like heaven, hell, the last judgment, the new creation, the kingdom of God, and so on. 

The point is that for Jesus you don’t just interpret Scripture in some flat way where you just read the meaning off the page (or the scroll!). You need to interpret it from a particular standpoint. And he says that the way to do so is from the perspective of God’s eternal, final, ultimate purposes. 

I wonder how we read our Bibles. Do we just lift verses off the page and out of context? Do we play what some people call ‘Bible bingo’? And it’s not just reading them in their immediate context which is important (and which we’ve been doing in this series), it’s about seeing the wider context of God’s great story and where it is heading. 

Now the Sadducees would object to this. ‘How can you do that,’ they would say, ‘when there is no evidence from the Torah that there is an age to come?’ So that is where the second part of Jesus’ response comes in. 

Here is where he says to these opponents, you say you go by what Moses teaches, but you don’t even understand him properly. The very thing you deny is there in the life, teaching, and experience of Moses himself! You want to talk about Moses, he says: well, here’s a question for you. How can Moses refer to ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ when all of those three men are dead? It makes no sense! If death is the end and that’s that, what on earth is the point of referring to God like this? 

The readers of Luke’s Gospel will not be surprised when Jesus says here that God ‘is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive’, because they have already heard Jesus give the Parable of Dives and Lazarus, where poverty-stricken Lazarus is carried off by the angels to Abraham, who is still alive. Jesus is consistent in his teaching, and Luke reflects that. 

The Sadducees thought they had game, set, and match, but not a bit of it. Jesus saved match point and turned the game on its head. It is their turn to join the company of those silenced by Jesus in Luke 20. 

The audience

Who is listening to this debate? We might expect it to be ‘the people’ again, but Luke has a surprise for us. Some teachers of the law are on the scene. It’s possible (but not certain) that these would have been aligned with the Pharisees, who originally were a more what we might call working class movement, and therefore not the most natural bedfellows of the Sadducees. 

Evidently, these teachers of the law take great delight in Jesus confounding the Sadducees. ‘Well said, teacher!’ they exclaim. And you would also expect them to have some sympathy with what Jesus teaches here. Remember they did not limit themselves to the first five books of the Bible. Although there is some debate as to when the canon of what we call the Old Testament was definitively agreed in Judaism, I think we can assume they accepted the books that mention or hint at resurrection. Hence, on this at least, Jesus is an ally. 

So is this good? Yes and no. On the one hand, this may be a sign of what was to come later in the early history of the church when some Pharisees sided with the first believers. In Acts 23, when Paul is on trial before the Sanhedrin, he cleverly says that he is on trial for believing in the resurrection of the dead, leading to a fierce example between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, where some of the Pharisees support Paul as an innocent man. 

But on the other hand, in the next few verses of Luke, Jesus will condemn the very same for not understanding the Scriptures as regards the Messiah, for not living their lives in the light of the age to come, and as hypocrites who love status, exploit the poor, and make a show of their spiritual practices (Luke 20:41-47). 

Overall, then, it seems that these are people who affirm some of the right doctrines, but it makes little difference in their lives. Being doctrinally accurate does not make them followers of the Messiah. It’s all very well cheering on Jesus for getting one over your rivals, but the bottom line is whether we are going to follow him as Saviour and Lord. 

And that following him will soon become quite tricky, as the story of Holy Week progresses. 

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Putting One Over Jesus, Luke 20:27-40 (Ordinary 32 Year C)

I first preached this sermon six years ago at Weybridge Methodist Church. I’ve dusted it down again for this Sunday following a heavy and fraught week.

Luke 20:27-38

Did you ever like putting one over on your teachers? I wondered at the chutzpah of a fellow student at theological college, who wrote at the top of one of his exam essays the verse from the Psalms which reads, ‘I have more wisdom than all my teachers.’ I hope he wrote some good answers!

Or perhaps you liked to prove the clever kid in the class wrong, or you rejoiced when they had a bad day? I have to say that I saw that one from the other side. I’m afraid I was the clever kid in the class, especially when it came to Maths. One year in an exam at secondary school I so rushed my answers because I thought it was all too easy that I found myself plummeting from first out of two hundred students in my year to fourteenth, Oh, the shame! And I am sure that many other teenagers enjoyed my temporary downfall.

That’s a little like what the Sadducees were attempting in our reading today. How they would love to smear egg on Jesus’ face! How they would love to bring him down a peg or two and reduce his credibility and authority with the crowds.

But why would they want to do that?

The Sadducees were historically connected to the Jerusalem priesthood, and they were generally a wealthy lot, who ensured they kept themselves comfortable by keeping in with the powerful. So they were very pally with the Roman forces that were occupying the Promised Land. People like that didn’t want to acknowledge the authority of Jesus, because following his teaching would undermine their addiction to power and wealth. If they could only discredit this pesky popular working-class preacher, then maybe his words wouldn’t keep them awake at night anymore.

Now what on earth does that have to do with us? We don’t want to undermine Jesus, surely? We love him. Jesus is our friend and our Saviour. We owe everything to him.

But sometimes we don’t want to hear what he says, either. His teaching is too uncomfortable for us at times. We don’t want to make him look foolish, still less look to carry out a character assassination, but we have our ways of making his awkward teaching irrelevant. So when he says challenging things about money and possessions, we argue that those sayings were only for those particular people at that specific time, and they don’t have universal application – at least, not in that form. Or when we find that Jesus believed in the existence of demons and this apparently offends our scientific minds, we say that Jesus was just a man of his time and he wouldn’t have known about the existence of mental illness. You can add your own examples to this list.

The trouble, though, is this. As the late John Stott used to say, you can’t accept Jesus as Saviour without also confessing him as Lord. It’s not possible just to have the benefits of salvation without all that follows in the commitment of discipleship to the Lord Jesus Christ.

So the first challenge in our reading this morning is a challenge to our wills: will we bow the knee and truly acknowledge Jesus Christ not only as Saviour, but also as Lord?

Let’s move on. The second challenge is a challenge to our minds. What on earth is all this strange stuff about seven brothers each in turn marrying the same woman as one after another, they die?

It’s a Jewish custom, taken from the Old Testament, known as ‘Levirate Marriage’. A man had to have children to inherit from him. It’s rather like the concern many men have in our society to pass on the family surname to a son. Hence if in ancient Israel a man died without fathering children, it became the task of the next brother to marry the widow and father children that would count as the first man’s heirs.

Hence the Sadducees can build up their ludicrous story in an attempt to ridicule Jesus and his belief in the resurrection. For the Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection. They predominantly only read the first five books of the Bible rather than the later ones, which the Pharisees read. And as they saw it, there was nothing about resurrection in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, or Deuteronomy. To be fair, there’s very little in other Old Testament Scriptures, either: the resurrection of the righteous is taught in Daniel, and it may be hinted at in Job, but there’s precious little.

So they tell their imaginary story. You can almost hear the smug self-satisfaction as they think they have proved to Jesus that his belief in the resurrection is laughable. If you want a similar example in our society, then think about the way some militant atheists laugh when they think they have dismissed what you and I believe as ignorant superstition.

But Jesus takes the Sadducees to task for a failure of logic. They just haven’t thought this through. Passing on the family name assumes that generations are going to die and need replacing; how is that going to happen with the resurrection, in which there will be no more death?

Friends, not all of those who oppose Christianity have thought through their objections carefully. Richard Dawkins in particular is one who recycles and rehashes old, tired arguments that have long been refuted by Christians. If we can get a hearing for our convictions (and I grant you that isn’t always easy) then it can be quite simple to refute what people like him say.

But if the opponents of Jesus are shown up for not using their minds well, then it behoves Christians to use their thinking to the glory of God. Remember that Jesus said we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.

And I say that knowing how reluctant some Christians are to think hard about their faith and about life. Many years ago, someone suggested that the church carries on as if the old Sunday School chorus wasn’t ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam’ so much as ‘Jesus wants me for a zombie’. Ministers see congregations glaze over corporately when they ask them to think hard.

But this is what we must do, prayerfully, as an act of worship. I don’t mean that everyone has to be an intellectual – that isn’t everybody’s gift – but we do all need to think to the glory of God about our faith. I hear church members complain about the public success of the new atheists in recent years, but when it comes to it they don’t want to make an effort with their minds themselves. They would rather bury their brains in the sand. Yet if we want to counter them and show that the Christian vision has more power to explain life than theirs, then we have to dedicate our thinking to God, pray that the Holy Spirit will help us in the life of the mind, and seek to express what Paul calls in 2 Corinthians ‘the mind of Christ’.

Thirdly and finally, the reading contains a challenge to our vision. Who or what controls our vision and imagination? I suggest to you that in a lot of areas – and certainly when we consider life after death – Christians have surrendered their vision and imagination to non-Christian sources. Our account of faith becomes seriously sub-biblical, if not downright unbiblical.

What do I mean? Listen to the average Christian talking about death and the hereafter and you hear a range of convictions that have nothing to do with historic Christianity. When someone dies, we hear people say that it doesn’t matter, because the body is just a shell for the real person, for the soul. Friends, that isn’t biblical thinking, that’s pagan Greek philosophy.

The life of the world to come doesn’t consist in us being disembodied souls floating on clouds. The vision of Jesus and the apostles is of resurrection. That’s bodily. In fact, you might say it’s bodily plus, given the additional powers that the resurrection body of Jesus seemed to have. You can’t even use Jesus’ reference to being ‘like the angels’ (verse 36) as anything other than bodily: in the Bible, angels manifestly have bodies.

The vision Jesus gives us here is of the bodily and the physical in a new existence – souped-up, if you like. You might say that something physical is missing here: if there is to be no marrying and no childbirth in the new creation, then presumably there is no more sex after death. Here is the reason why our marriage vows are ‘till death do us part’: marriage doesn’t figure in the new world.

But then we have already said that there is no more need for procreation, because generations will not need to be replaced. And surely the intimacy and ecstasy possible between a husband and a wife will be superseded by even closer, deeper, and more intense relationship with our God. Not only will we now see face to face rather than through a glass darkly (according to 1 Corinthians 13), we can also expect – according to Augustine of Hippo – for everything in the new creation to mediate the presence of God to us.

Our Christian vision of relationships, then, in the new heavens and the new earth, is not one that can be reduced to being reunited with our loved ones, however comforting that may be. It is about being together in the undiluted presence of God.

And because this is not about disembodied souls, let alone harp players on clouds, it sets before us a vision of a healed creation and restored relationships with God and one another.

Once you state it in those terms, you can see that we have something we can anticipate in this life, albeit not perfectly. We can work for the healing of people and of our planet. We can work for reconciliation with God through the Cross of Christ, and for peace-making between people. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we can pray for healing, work for justice, evangelise, and reconcile in the name of Jesus. When we do so, we are pointing the world towards God’s great future and witnessing to Jesus Christ by sharing that vision.

Indeed, we witness to him as well when we are willing – like Jesus – to use our minds for his glory, to think through difficult issues of faith in the light of Scripture and in listening to hard questions.

We also witness to our Lord and Saviour when we acknowledge that our will comes to an end of itself and must bow to his superior will. We are not just believers, we are disciples.

All of this is possible in the marriage and family life context of our reading, but also in all of our relationships, our networks, neighbourhoods, places of work, and our leisure environments.

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