There came to him some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died without children. And the second and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. Afterward the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife.”
And Jesus said to them, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.” Then some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” For they no longer dared to ask him any question.
(Luke 20:27-40 ESV)
I am sure that the Saducees thought they were very clever when they asked Jesus their question about the resurrection. And they probably spent a long time coming up with the story in this gospel reading, which they were sure would silence all of Jesus’ talk about the resurrection. Jesus however, does not seem to have been especially impressed.
On one level the Saducees meant their question to be ridiculous. The story they tell Jesus is wildly unlikely, and even comical. For one thing, marrying this woman seems to be certain death. If this story had ever really happened, by the time the woman got to the third husband or so, someone would have gotten suspicious. . .
But the Saducees meant the story to be ridiculous.
They meant it to be ridicuolous, because they were not really asking a question, they were laying a trap. In the book of Acts, Luke tells us that the Saducees did not believe in the resurrection. They did not want to ask Jesus about the resurrection, they wanted to prove that the whole idea of resurrection is nonsense.
They wanted to make Jesus look as ridiculous as their story of these seven hapless brothers. To put this dialouge in context, Jesus has just cleansed the temple, and now he stands in the temple teaching. By cleansing the temple, he effectively declared himself the messiah, and so declared himself a higher authority than those whose business it was to look after the temple, people like the pharisees, saducees and scribes. So they wanted to discredit him. When they asked Jesus about the resurrection, they expected him to stand there blankly, exposed as a fraud in front of the whole crowd when he was unable to answer. The crowd would laugh, and Jesus would look like a fool.
But Jesus did answer, and it was the Saducees who walked away looking like fools.
Jesus answers the question in such a way that he not only refutes their argument, but gets at the very heart of their error. The real problem with the Saducees, is that they have too small a view of God. They think of God as a God who is only concerned with this life. We can see that from the question they ask. They create a scenario that is based totally on the values and necessities of the present age.
The practice of one brother marrying another’s widow to carry on the brother’s family name, was a custom that only applies in a world where death reigns and the best we can hope for is children to carry on the family name. The Saducees thought that the only immortality to be had was to be remembered by others. They only thought in human terms.
And they believed that God is only really concerned with this world, just like they were. The Saducees were so caught up in living to this world, and to other people, that they don’t see that “all live to God.”
They had a view of the world in which death was the end of everything, even of God’s care for his people. Which means that this life is all there is. If you have a bad life - or if, like the brothers in their story, you die childless - then that’s the end. There is no hope, no redemption. Maybe that’s why they were so protective of their own authority and position, and so offended when Jesus challenged it. It was all they could hope for.
They were so caught up in this way of thinking that they couldn’t see the resurrection when it was right in front of them. They couldn’t see it in the Scriptures, in God’s dialogue with Moses, which Jesus points to as evidence of God’s continued care for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, even though they were long dead. And for the same reason, they could not recognize Jesus as the “resurrection and the life.” Of all people then, the Saducees were perhaps the least prepared to recognize Jesus.
In their eyes, Jesus would not have looked like a messiah, but like a failure. He was not a messiah who came offering worldly success or prosperity. He preached that the poor, the afflicted and the persecuted were blessed. Finally, like the brothers in the Sadducee’s story, he would die childless, and even abandoned by his friends. And that, the Saducees would have seen as the end of Jesus’ story.
The saducees were so fascinated by the things of this world and this age, that they could not see beyond it to the possibility of an age when the successes and failures of this world will not matter any more. Jesus’ response to their challenge exposes the worldliness at the heart of their question. We don’t know quite how they responded, except that they did not ask Jesus any more questions. Probably, they were angry, and probably most of them didn’t change their views and suddenly start believing in the resurrection.
But Jesus had given them the opportunity to do just that. By showing just how distorted their view of God and of his creation were, Jesus gave his opponents the opportunity to look at things from God’s view, and not from a human view.
It is tempting, when we read this passage, to try and use it to construct some theories about what the afterlife will look like, or about the nature of marriage, and its place in heaven. There is certainly material here for that, but I don’t think that is really why Luke recorded the story. I think he included it so that we, like the saducees, can have opportunity to consider whether our view of God is too small.
The Saducees thought that with Death, God’s concern for his people ended. We can fall into thinking that God’s care for us is limited, perhaps not by death, but by other circumstances. Especially when times are difficult, and we are in the midst of failure, we can forget even to call on God, we can think that God has forgotten or neglected us.
When you come to a point in ministry when you are not sure if you are reaching anyone at all; when your church plants are not growing, no matter how good the sermons are; when you find yourself trying to minister in a church where the leadership actually seems to be doing its best to oppose the gospel, and you feel very alone and defeated, those are the times when it is easy to forget that God still cares. Those are the times when we are tempted to fix things our own way and not wait for God.
This gospel reading is a reading for those times. Jesus is calling us to remember that God’s care is not limited to this world, and that the succeses and failures of this age are not ultimate. He is calling us to remember that we are not a children of this age, but of the resurrection. And Jesus himself, and his resurrection are our guarantee that God can overcome all things, even death.
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