The Twenty Second Sunday after Pentecost , 11/10/2019

Sermon on Luke 20:27-38, by Hubert Beck

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.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version,

FAULTY COMPARISONS LEAD TO FAULTY CONCLUSIONS

It is not unusual to point out that certain kinds of comparisons are not useful because one cannot compare apples with oranges and arrive at a proper conclusion to whatever problem with which one is dealing.

Jesus goes far beyond that old saying many times over in our text. He points out that one cannot compare life on this earth with life in the hereafter in an exchange with those who want to trap him into saying or doing things that will make it possible for them to charge him with either a form of heresy or a totally UNJewish or even a gentile teaching or practice of some kind.

The scene of this confrontation is the last in a series of incidents, most or even many of which people know in isolation but which must be established in an ascending order for us to catch the really strong thrust of the text we are considering this morning.

THE SCENE IN GENERAL

Just when it looked like Jesus had reached the absolute pinnacle of fame and potential power by riding into Jerusalem on a colt to the great acclaim of those welcoming him into the holy city, he turned everything upside down.

He began this turnaround by lamenting the sad blindness of Jerusalem to what was happening around and within her, warning her that her enemies would “hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you.” It doesn’t take much of an imagination to realize what a general uproar those words created.

Then he fired the anger of the religious authorities in Jerusalem even more by “driving out those who sold” on the temple grounds with a stern reminder that the temple was a “house of prayer” . . . even accusing the sellers of the animals and other things necessary for making sacrificial offerings whose

tables he had overturned that they had “made it a den of robbers.” In effect, he took the temple over from those who considered it to be in their custody and essentially made it a station for his own activity.

Accordingly he began teaching in the temple, claiming both the authorization for speaking the words with which he taught and his right to do so in this temple that he had virtually claimed as his teaching post in Jerusalem. Of course, one can well imagine that he would be challenged by the officials in the temple on all these counts. They therefore asked him “By what authority do you [teach] these things, or who gave you this authority?” Both the teachings and the place had clearly been in their own custody up to this point – and now Jesus claimed them both.

Try though they may to regain control of the situation as the proper representatives of these holy places and activities not to speak of the teaching therein, these authoritative figures unmistakably “were seeking to destroy him, [but] did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words.”

Therefore they set about trying to trap Jesus into saying things that were at best only marginally in keeping with the things being taught by them as the proper and correct beliefs . . . or, if possible, things that were completely outrageous and beyond the limits of the authorized Judaic doctrines. They kept hoping that he would, as we say, “slip up” by saying shocking or even appalling things.

No luck, though! Jesus made their efforts over into an embarrassment of their efforts, telling a very pointed parable that was clearly aimed at accusing his accusers of being IRresponsible, even leading their people into great peril. They were rapidly becoming disgracecd in their efforts at disgracing him.

Undeterred, they continued their assault on his teaching and his claims to authority, going so far as to underhandedly asking him questions concerning his possible loyalty or disloyalty to either the Jews or to Rome. No matter how he answered the questions posed to him, his response would surely make him vulnerable to great danger either from the state or from those who were charged with maintaining the accepted and acceptable Jewish teachings.

Again he confounded them with the way he responded to the point where they actually had to “marvel at his answer.” So they “became silent.”

THE TRAP IS LAID TO CATCH JESUS

Well, though most “became silent,” a subset of religious authorities – the Sadducees. who were specifically in charge of the temple grounds – thought they could trap him with a theoretical question that had its base in the Holy Scripture, specifically in the words of Moses recorded in Deuteronomy – which is a “Second Book of Laws” retelling Moses’ final instructions before leaving the people who were just establishing residence in the Holy Land.

They set up a theoretical situation based on the instructions found in Deuteronomy 25:5-10. Those instructions were as follows: The wife of a man who dies without children to maintain the family’s name and posterity is to have a child by her husband’s brother. That brother was, by the standards of that time, to have a son by the dead man’s wife, thus preserving the man’s family name and posterity. It was to be as though her husband, himself, had fathered the child. If / when the brother refused to do that duty, he forced the wife to appeal to the village elders for justice in the matter.

The Sadducees expanded this command by speaking of this in the following way in order to put still greater pressure on the kind of answer a responder might give: What if the widow of this man whose brother was to father a child refused to perform his responsibility with / for her – or, what if this man had

seven brothers, each of whom died without having raised up a son from the widowed wife in spite of their responsibility to father such a child in the dead brother’s name, refused to do so or could not do so? One must also remember that the Sadducees who brought this imaginary situation to Jesus were asking a question actually revolving around two questions, one a “surface” question and the second a “doctrinal” question.

The “doctrinal” question lying under the surface had to do with whether there even WAS TO BE a resurrection while the “surface” question had to do with a definition of marital responsibilities when one mate has died and a second mate had an obligation to take her to wife through all seven brothers. So their inquiry was actually a double-edged inquiry, taunting Jesus on the one hand with a reference to a resurrection (which his teaching included but which they denied) along with the proposed inquiry into which of all those seven brothers who had “taken her to wife” would rightly be called her husband when all had died.

This “command” or “instruction” in Deuteronomy, whichever one chooses to call it, was used as the trapping passage by which the Sadducees sought to put Jesus into an awkwardly uncomfortable position – or even an unorthodox situation if he denied the scriptural injunction of Deuteronomy that would give leverage for the religious authorities to get him entirely out of the scope of their frustrated efforts.

It seemed to be an “either-or” question that would ambush Jesus no matter how he answered it.

THE TRAP THAT FAILED TO SPRING

That brings us back to where we started! Not all comparisons are equal in value or truth.

Jesus made it plain by telling them that the resurrected life is not just an extension of life as we know it on earth. He admitted that life as we know it does, indeed, have a certain order about it. “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage.” But that is as far as it goes, for life in the resurrection is of an entirely other sort. That must be taken into account when one undertakes a comparison between earth and heaven as the Sadducees were doing.

Life in the age to come, even though there is, in a sense, a continuity of some kind with this life since the very word “resurrection” implies an “old being” raised from the dead into a “new life.” is not of the same sort as the earthly life. Any and all comparisons fall so far short as to make it impossible to extract answers to questions such as those the Sadducees had posed.

Concerning that “new life” we earthlings actually know nothing for it is of such a radically altered mode of existence as to make any comparison between the two essentially impossible. In that age to come resurrected dwellers “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.” Such a resurrected life is so different from anything a person of this earth has ever experienced or can, in fact, really imagine that it is impossible to really comprehend much less describe this difference because it is so foreign to anything we see or with which we are familiar on earth. It has nothing to do with mere extensions of worldly life.

This, in the first place, had to be taken into consideration when the Sadducees and others of their sort asked questions such as they asked. Comparing apples with oranges is a long way even from comparing life on this earth with the resurrected life following death. Jesus was quick, direct and emphatic in pointing this out as a false comparison.

But he went still further, challenging the Sadducees’ refusal to believe in a resurrection of any sort: “But that the dead are raised, even Moses [to whom you so readily made reference in talking about marriage]

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.”

Thus the confrontation with the various parties seeking to corner Jesus in a way favorable to themselves came to an end at which point Jesus took his turn at challenging those who were so determined to trap him. But that is an altogether other story beyond the text which we are considering this morning.

THE ACCOUNT ADDRESSES US TODAY

Although the first thing that strikes the mind of many people who read this account has to do with an abstractionery flight into questions about relationships in the resurrection, one does well to recognize that the real point of the account, as Jesus makes quite plain, has to do with the gigantic difference between the earthly experiences of us humans and the resurrected life of “those who are worthy” (as Jesus put it in the text) of a radically different kind of existence in the resurrection. It is not simply an extension of what we know as earthlings. It is a thoroughly “other” type of existence yet to be revealed upon entering it.

So is a consideration of this text nothing other than a warning against making too light or too worthless a comparison between earth and heaven? Yes and no. There is something much deeper here than meets the eye . . . namely, the need to consider and pay serious attention to those things that are revealed to those who are intent on taking God and his will and his way with earnestness and sincerity while laying aside all our imaginations, earthly assumptions, and pompous questions and claims having to do with understanding or even pretending to figure out the ways and the will of God.

That is a very important warning, for we all are very quick to speak too glibly about things concerning which we know so little as to know nothing – as though we “speak for God” in so many, many ways. We “explain” the mysteries of God in earthly ways that fall far too short of basically trusting and believing words because we make them up in such simplistic and superficial ways of clarifying and even rationalizing the inscrutability of those ways – and then speaking of them as “the way of the Lord” when we know nothing of the sort. It is not unusual to “comfort” people suffering loss with far too facile sorts of “explanations” or “assurances” beyond the word of the Lord.

In short, we are very sympathetic with the Sadducees because we are so commonly one of them! Jesus is clearly warning against speaking of God’s ways as though they were mere extensions of our own earthly experiences. The word of the Lord is not really “understandable” in the way we either want it to be or even think it to be. Long before Jesus came upon the scene God spoke through his prophet Isaiah, saying, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:9

It is hard for us humans to be serious about hearing and listening carefully to the word of the Lord, for we place so much trust in our own words and ways. Lest the Sadducee in us take root and hold us captive, it is imperative that we hear the warning lying under and within our text for today: Do not trust your own personal instincts; your own rationalizations; your own ways of extending the transience of this earth into the endless eternity where God makes his eternal abode and invites us to share it with him.

Better by far to stand with Peter rather than with the Sadducees when Peter asks, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” John 6:68

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Retired Servant of the Lord Hubert Beck

E-Mail: hbeck@austin.rr.com

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