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25. Sunday after Pentecost, 11/10/2013
Sermon on Luke 20:27-38, by Amy C. Schifrin
27 There came to him some Sad′ducees, those who say that there is no resurrection, 28 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 wife and raise up children for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers; the first took a wife, and died without children; 30 and the second 31 and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. 32 Afterward the woman also died. 33 In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife." 34 And Jesus said to them, "The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage; 35 but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, 36 for they cannot die any more, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. 37 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. 38 Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living; for all live to him."
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
I grew up in the 1950's and ‘60's in a home where there was only one black and white television set, and it was placed in the far corner of our living room. Encased in wood, it was a sturdy structure with a variable remote: My father would yell at whichever child was closer to him to get up and change the channel. He liked to watch westerns, war stories, and the fights, and thus our families television viewing was limited to what he liked.
My mother didn't care much for TV. She worked all day in a tough New York high school and didn't think that watching violence was entertainment. She didn't think that slapstick comedy or sexual infidelity were entertainment either, so neither cartoons nor soap operas were a part of my daytime vacation viewing...until one winter vacation late in my teen years when I was sent to help my paternal grandmother in her apartment in Miami. She seemed to be cooking or cleaning most of day, and then, so was I. But at 12 noon she would stop whatever chore she was doing, sit down on her couch, and announce that it was time for her to watch her stories. I was happy to set my dust rag down, too, and by the second day I was addicted to The Edge of Night, As The World Turns, and All My Children.
My grandmother, of course, had to fill me in on all the characters-give me the oral history-the real scoop, and learning the story from my grandmother who had never learned to read or write in any language, and who spoke Yiddish at least ninety percent of the time, gave the story even more depth and character than the North American producers had ever imagined. To her way of thinking, these folks were really real, and I think I learned more about them than writers of the soaps had truly written.
Her very favorite character was Erica Kain (Susan Lucci to the uninformed), who was the long-standing star of All My Children. Now here's a woman who has been married more than seven times, even married multiple times to the same man, married to brothers and brother-in-laws, widowed and divorced again and again. Can you imagine asking someone whose wife she might be in the resurrection? Miss Kain was a fictitious character and it is a trick question, because mostly we're not so interested in the answer as much as we want to see the one we question squirm for a bit. It's sort of a test, and it's not unlike the question that the Sadducees, who didn't even believe in the resurrection of the dead, asked of Jesus that day.
Jesus had been teaching in the Temple: the Son of God announcing the will of his Father, and Jesus who teaches with the Father's authority, is the finest teacher ever imaginable. He knows that the same words spoken as a false or trick question, or spoken by one who is grieving the loss of a brother, like Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, are really two different questions. He knows by that the way the question is asked, if one really wants his answer or if they are truly seeking the comfort of God. He knows by the way we ask our questions if we, too, are seeking his will or if we are just seeking, like the Sadducees, to fool him. And Jesus the Rabbi, the teacher who is Lord of all, will not be fooled.
The Sadducees were a religious group within Judaism who accepted only the Books of Moses (the Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) as authoritative, and in their interpretation these books did not speak directly to the issues of life after death. They believed that a man could live on only if he had a son to carry on his name. So if a married man died without having a son, they understood it to be his brother's duty to marry the widow and to try then to produce a son to carry on his brother's name. It didn't hurt that such a marriage of a brother-in-law and sister-in-law would also keep the accrued property in the family.
Their intent in questioning Jesus about whose wife this poor woman will be, this ancient Erica Kain, is their attempt to refute the resurrection of the dead. They really don't care about the woman's fate since they neither cared about her in this life nor believe that there is any life beyond this one. This wasn't the first question that the Sadducees used to try to trap Jesus, having first asked about John's Baptism and then about paying tribute to Caesar, which they also misunderstood. So Jesus, again seeing right through their question takes them back to the Book of Exodus and shows them that they have misread the words of Moses and thus misunderstood the word and will of God.
But that the dead are raised, he says, but that the dead are raised...even Moses showed you when he told [you] about the burning bush where he calls the LORD the God of Abraham, 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.
The promise of the resurrection is written all the way through the Torah, the Books of Moses. In the story of the creation of man and woman, from the gift of their lives in the garden to their fall beneath the serpent's belly, God says to the serpent that, he will bring forth a man from the seed of the woman, and his heel will crush your head. In that word, Adam and Eve, even in the midst of their punishment are given the hope of the resurrection-for God's promise is now and forevermore stronger than their sin.
In the story of Abraham, our Father in faith, and of his beloved son, Isaac, Isaac will be bound in obedience to his Father's will as a sign of the One who is to come-the lamb who will be sacrificed on our behalf.
In the burning bush God tells Moses, I am the God of Abraham, not I was the God of Abraham. I am the God of the living.
And like a stone rolled in front of a tomb, the Sadducees are silenced for that moment, their question dead in the air. For in the age to come, the resurrected age, all the laws of Moses will be of no effect, for sin will be no more, defeated by the Risen One who crushes the serpent's head. In the face of such good news concerning our future, the ridiculous questions of the Sadducees concerning marriage laws will sound as absurd as Erica Kain wondering about how outlandish her next wedding dress might be.
Jesus, the Living One, will bring life into these mortal bodies again so that they will die no more. I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, says the LORD to Moses. For just as he will say, I am the resurrection and the life, to two grieving sisters who really did care about the eternal life of a brother, so he will say to all of us who trust that their eternal future is on his hands, Come, O blessed of my Father and inherit the kingdom prepared for you before the foundations of this world.
Amen.
Bemerkung:
The Rev. Dr. Amy C. Schifrin serves as pastor of Mission in Christ and Faith Lutheran Churches in the Iowa Mission District of the North American Lutheran Church.