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.