Luke 20:27-38
November 10, 2013
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
This is a strange story, isn’t it? It’s like some of the discussions that we have been having in my Inquirers Class: “If God can do anything, can God make a rock so big that God can’t move it?”
The purpose of the Sadducees’ question about the resurrection is to embarrass, trap, and condemn Jesus. Their question was making fun of the idea of resurrection, and they felt that they could disprove it by making it sound ridiculous, thus making Jesus look ridiculous through the simple use of logic. Jesus knows that he is being baited.
Jesus decides to engage the questioners, the Sadducees. He may not take their question very seriously, but he does take them seriously. Jesus thinks that they are wrong in their understanding of resurrection and decides to teach them. The Sadducees believe that life on earth was everything. They were interested in earthly power and status which meant that they supported the upper class social structure which controlled the wealth as well as their Roman overlords. The Sadducees have erroneously assumed that earthly institutions will continue forever. In the end, they believed that the dead stay dead; they do not come back.
Given their culture’s beliefs about marriage, they want to know, to which man will a woman belong in the resurrection, if there is any such thing. Hoping, of course, to demonstrate that resurrection is a silly idea, since their question is problematic no matter how you answer it. Will she belong to the first brother, since that was the first one she married? Or to the seventh one, since she didn’t marry anyone after that? Or would God let her choose whichever one was nicest to her? See how silly that is, Jesus? Therefore, resurrection is silly, say the Sadducees.
Marriage
Our notion about marriage is based on romantic love; we fall in love for someone and choose to commit our life and our future to that person, on the basis on those feelings of attachment. So it seems cruel to us to suggest that, somehow, in the life that is to come, we no longer get to be in partnership with that person in the same way. In verse 35, Jesus declares that those who are among the resurrected “neither marry nor are given in marriage.” In our culture, it makes some sense to worry about that. I hope that all of you who are married would be worried about this!
Our western understanding of marriage is not like in the Middle East and certainly not like in Jesus’ time. Perhaps it’s more like our ancestors and parents in China years ago. Put yourself in the widow’s shoes. Here we see you have been a repeated widow seven times. You are married for the first time, to a man that your parents probably chose for you. It’s likely that he is several years older than you are, perhaps even a friend of the family who is closer to your parents’ age than yours. But he is successful, and he owns land, so that your children will be provided for, and your sons will have a good share to inherit. Perhaps over time you come to have some affection for this husband, if he treats you well, but you certainly didn’t marry him because you had fallen in love with him!
Some of you remember the comedian, Henny Youngman who often makes his wife, Sadie Cohen, the butt of his jokes. Youngman said, “The secret of happy marriage remains a secret. Some people ask the secret of our long marriage. We take time to go to a restaurant two times a week. A little candlelight, dinner, soft music and dancing. She goes Tuesdays, I go Fridays.” In reality, the two were very close and were married for more than 60 years.
Let’s get back to our Bible story. Imagine a terrible thing happens. Out plowing the field one day, there’s an accident with the oxen, and your husband is killed. You don’t have any children to inherit his property. According to Jewish law, it is the obligation of his brother to marry you—along with any other wife the brother already has—in order that you can give birth to children who will be thought of legally as your first husband’s children, so that they can inherit the land.
Why is that such a big deal? Because as a woman, in that society, you need sons who will be responsible for caring for you and supporting you in your old age. You can’t on your own inherit your husband’s property. Only a son or rarely, a daughter can. If you have no children, you are helpless. So even though the mechanism of it seems strange to us in our day, the law ensures that a childless widow will not be condemned to a life of poverty or worse. Her husband’s family must provide for her, including the responsibility of his brother to beget children that will bear his name.
The reason for this law is that without it landowning males might quickly see the chance to increase their holdings over time by insuring that their brothers died childless, thus giving them a greater portion of the inheritance. So the law had to require that a man’s brothers do this, since it wasn’t in their personal best interest to do so, but only for the community’s best interest in mind. Do you get it?
Okay…Husband #1 dies. You marry his brother, according to what the law requires. But before that marriage can produce any children, he dies. Repeat the procedure with Brother #3, Brother #4, Brother #5, 6, and 7…all of whom die before fathering a son on behalf of dearly-departed Brother #1. Now if this were a real story, with all these brothers dropping dead one after another, we’d probably have ourselves a really good murder mystery and all the fingers are pointing at the black widow! But since it’s only a hypothetical story, posed by the Sadducees, we can leave that behind and focus on the real question behind their silliness.
To whom will she belong in the resurrection? It’s not as if she chose any of them to be her husband. We cannot assume that she was particularly in love with any of them, or that she spent any more time with them than she absolutely had to. So they asked Jesus, “Whose will she be?”
Family Relationships
Let’s look at another example outside of marriage. If I were a Sadducee today, posing a trick question on Jesus, I might say, You know, Jesus, when I was a child, I had to do everything my father told me. Didn’t matter what I thought or what I wanted; my task was always to obey. Even though we’re both adults now, I am still expected to carry out his wishes. Well, I have a son, who is supposed to obey me; and some day, he will have a son who is expected to obey him, and so on.
My question is this, Jesus: In the resurrection, who’s going to give orders to whom? Will the older and earlier generations always have more authority, and the youngest always have to do their bidding? Jesus might respond with something like, “In that time there are neither parents nor children, but God is the father and mother to us all.” Does that mean that we no longer have a relationship with those who were our earthly parents? Of course not. It does mean that those relationships are transformed in the presence of God, and becoming something other than what they were.
Likewise, Jesus suggests, in the resurrection, “they neither marry nor are given in marriage.” Does this mean we won’t get to spend eternity with the persons we have loved the most? I don’t think so, although it probably does mean that we will also have to become accustomed to spending eternity with a few folks we really didn’t think would be there!
Does it mean that we will no longer have greater affection for some people than for others? Probably not, though it may mean that we still have more to learn about love than we learned in this life.
Does it mean that our resurrected bodies will no longer experience any kind of physical desire? We hope not! But it may mean that those desires are channeled differently, or expressed differently, than they are in these un-resurrected bodies we currently inhabit.
It also does seem to mean that the institution of marriage, as different human societies have practiced it over time, is not going to be there, or at least, will not be recognizable to us as “marriage.”
The Bigger Point
The main point of this passage is that resurrection is true. When the women and disciples came to the tomb to find Jesus’ body, it was empty. The angel said, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” A little later the Risen Christ is asked, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that had taken place there in these days?” Everyone is believing that resurrection happened. A little later the Risen Christ asks, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” Finally, the Risen Christ asks, “Does anyone have anything here to eat?” Only the resurrected is able to eat.
Resurrection is based on the capacity of God to give life to those who are already dead. This may still sound ridiculous to many, but to those who believe, Jesus is anything but ridiculous. God vindicated Jesus by raising him from the dead, and God extends the resurrection to all those who are in him and believe.
Jesus constantly insists that we must stretch our understanding about who God is, and what God can and will do. We are forever trying to limit God to what our reason can account for, or at least, what our imaginations can imagine. Time and again, God surprises us, as Jesus did on so many occasions when he was walking among us, teaching us and healing all of us.
For a moment, put yourself in the Sadducees’ place rather the widow’s place. Not only has Jesus just demolished your trick question to try to prove that there is no resurrection, Jesus also just told you that when that resurrection comes, you’re not going to have your wife around to wait on you any more! Oh sure, she may well be there, but she isn’t going to “belong to” you. She will be her own resurrected self, not “given” to you in marriage. Now if you’re a woman overhearing this conversation, this may sound like good news indeed. If you’re a Sadducee, it probably doesn’t sound so good at all.
The future that God has planned for us is far more than we can imagine and different than we can imagine. Throughout the gospels, but particularly Luke, Jesus reminds us that the future is likely to sound like and feel like good news to those who have been powerless, and not quite so good news to those who have been.
Better news to the poor than to the rich. Good news to the weak, not so good news to the strong…especially if they have grown strong at the expense of others.
Good news to the imprisoned, not such good news to those who put them there. Good news to the refugees, not very good news to the ones they are fleeing from.
For Jesus to say to a group of first-century men that in the resurrection, we “neither marry nor are given in marriage,” is not a statement about human love and commitment. It is a statement about inequality, and unbalanced power, and the fact that sometimes, we have arranged human society in ways that treat certain humans as being less than other humans.
Jesus said the Kingdom of God will not be like that. Let us pray that, unlike the Sadducees, it won’t take us seven weddings and a funeral before we can hear Jesus’ good news message. Let us pray that we can see into God’s imagination and know that the future that awaits for us is far different and far better, than even the best we have lived here.
Let us pray that God’s kingdom will come…perhaps even on earth as it is in heaven.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, in our living and in our dying, in our life and in our death, help us to put our trust in you, that as in the beginning, so in our ending, we may rest secure in your eternal love. Challenge us to look deeply into the inequities of our society and in our relationships and lead us to love and respect one another while we are on earth as we know it is already in heaven. Bless our time together in worship in the name of Christ Jesus. Amen.