Luke 20:27-40
November 7, 2004
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
As a student, one of the most difficult aspects of going to school is testing—exams and quizzes. We have all wished there was an eighth day in the week to study!
But if you have ever been a teacher, then you may agree with me when I say that the toughest part of testing is giving the test. It takes a great deal of skill to test for knowledge. When I was doing some graduate work at Temple University, I took a course on statistics. The professor spoke at great length about the challenges of testing and how imprecise it is in measuring results. But at the end of the course, we all had to take a test for our final grade!
The reason why it’s so difficult to come up with a good test is that behind every question on a test is the assumed world of the question. Let me explain with this example. There was an astronomy professor who asked, on a final exam in astronomy, “List three things that occur on the earth that do not occur on the moon.” I suppose that the professor had in mind some sort of geological process unique to the earth.
But a student who knew a world different from the professor’s heard the question and listed in succession: “Skateboarding, Bruce Springsteen, and the Republican Party.”
Behind every question is the assumed world of the questioner. The astronomy professor was living in one world, while the student was living in another.
Jesus Being Tested
Today, we see in the Scriptures that Jesus is given an exam, a quiz that takes place shortly before Jesus moves toward the crucifixion. Jesus’ time on earth is like the end of the semester so Jesus is taking his exams. Jesus’ critics were attempting to trick him up with a series of tough questions. They were not really serious in their questions but were only hoping to embarrass him publicly.
The Sadducees came to Jesus with this hypothetical story, “There were seven brothers, each whom married the first brother’s widow, but none of them produced a child.” Here is the exam question: “Now in the resurrection, whose wife will she be?”
Seven weddings. Seven funerals. In the next life she can’t be married to brother number one because she has been married to brothers’ number two to seven too. She can’t be married to all of the brothers because she must be married to one man. They had Jesus scratching his head wondering how to answer this almost impossible exam question. If you were Jesus, how would you answer this question?
Different World
Remember the example of the astronomy professor and the student taking the exam? Although they were in the same class, the professor and the student were in two different worlds. This is true in Jesus’ situation too. The assumed world of the Sadducees was different from that of Jesus’.
Usually it’s the Pharisees that question Jesus. But this time, it was the priestly class, the Sadducees. The Sadducees were the most conservative of the professional clergy. They counted as scripture only the first five books of the Old Testament/Hebrew Scripture, the Law of Moses. So for the Sadducees, if it wasn’t in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers or Deuteronomy, it wasn’t the Word of God. In those books, they found no reference to the resurrection from the dead. So they did not believe it. See in Luke 20:27, it reads, “Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him.”
Now the Sadducees believed in the importance of living with one’s children. So in the Law of Moses, there is a rule that says that if a man dies without children then his brother must take his widow as a wife and have children for him!
The exam question, “If you say that the resurrection is true, therefore, whose wife will the woman be?” It’s a trick question. If the wife can’t be married to all seven brothers in heaven, then there must not be a resurrection. And since the Law of Moses says nothing about resurrection, to say there was, would be contradicting Moses. A very tough question for Jesus.
Sadducees assumed that their world would continue and extend into the next world with all of the human relationships somewhat intact. But to their great surprise, Jesus answered their question in such a simple, honest way, that their mouths were shut so tightly that they dared not ask him anymore questions.
Jesus says, “Let’s look at the Law of Moses. In your Scriptures, it says that God is the Lord of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Now the Lord God is not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” As Sadducees, you do believe in the living God, don’t you? Almost like the astronomy student, Jesus turned the Sadducees’ hypothetical question into a personal one. Forget about some made-up story, involving seven brothers. What about Abraham? What about Isaac? What about Jacob? How about Moses himself at the burning bush? The Lord God is not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.
Even the Sadducees after hearing Jesus’ answer to their exam question gave him a good grade, “Teacher, you have spoken well.”
Age of Resurrection
Jesus’ world is not like the Sadducees where people marry and are given in marriage. Jesus is working out of a different world where those who are worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection, neither marry nor are given in marriage. In fact, they cannot die anymore because they are like angels and are children of the God, children of the resurrection. God is a God of the living and not of the dead.
Jesus’ critics work out of an old world, a world of unjust social arrangements and much sadness. How about this poor woman? No one stops to ponder her sad predicament. They could easily have been talking about a piece of livestock in the way they speak of her. She has been the property of one husband after another. She has always been the property of some man. Now in the resurrection, whose property will she be?
Jesus responds to the Sadducees in this way, “In effect, your questions betray your limited point of view, your narrow frame of reference. The resurrection is not just some kind of extension of your world. It is a whole new world, the world God intended the world to be. The woman is a child of God, not a piece of property.”
It’s tempting to spend a lot of time worrying about what heaven might be like. Will I still be married to my spouse in heaven? Will I be reunited with my spouse who has died? The Sadducees’ question raises for us many real and touching issues that trouble us to no end.
But there is far less here about “what it will be like in heaven,” and a lot more about how it is here on earth. The key to Jesus’ answer is “God is the God of the living.” Yes, God is the God of heaven, but God is also the God of all life here on earth. And as long as we are a part of the earth, we are under God’s watchful care. Our lives can be lived confidently in the knowledge that God not only knows us, and knows our hearts, but cares about how we live in this place. Jesus wants us to be more concerned about the sad predicament of the widow than about her place in heaven.
Assuming that you passed all of your exams and you get to your graduation. You know how at a commencement, the speaker is sure to welcome the graduates into the “real world” making the assumption that the four years that you just spent in college was fake. It’s like how some of us think when we come to worship on Sunday—some kind of fake and artificial world to escape from the real world out there. But in reality, we are here this morning, in church, so that we can be more highly motivated to serve Christ right now—in this place. Christians believe that we come to church on a weekly basis, not to escape the real world, but rather, by God’s grace, to experience more fully the real world—namely, the world as God intends it to be. The world here is more real in God’s eyes than the one out there!
The Eighth Day
When we think of our future, we tend to think on the basis of our past. What happened yesterday will happen tomorrow. If we think this is the best that we can do today, it’s reasonable to think that we will do this tomorrow. This is how the Sadducees assumed the future to be like—more of the same. It’s like looking at our calendars and see that each day is the same as the next day.
But God’s world is something that God creates, a place where God gets what God wants and, as Jesus says, God wants life, wants all of us as God’s beloved and cherished children.
If you are still thinking about last week’s elections, forget about it because God’s world is different. God will have his way and it will be about life, love, peace, and justice!
The church once spoke of Sunday, the day of resurrection, as “the eighth day.” The world as we know it was created in six days, God rested from those labors on the seventh day. But the “eighth day” is that day when creation is brought to completion, perfected as God intended it to be.
Are you willing to let Jesus come into your life and into your world and disrupt your conventional world and lead you into an age of resurrection? Can you let Jesus be your Lord and Savior who died on the Cross to usher in the age of resurrection be an invitation for you to believe that your resurrection will be marked by death so that you may be an angel and a child of God?
May today, “the eighth day” for us at FCBC be one to proclaim that God is the God of the living; for to him, we are all alive.
Let us pray.
Lord God, you loved the world so much that you did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Give us the “eighth day,” the day of resurrection to know that Jesus is our Lord and Savior. Praise be to God! Amen.