Sunday Worship 9 November | Lectionary Proper 26: To Him All Are Alive

This morning's reflection saw us stay with the lectionary, but we also marked Remembrance Sunday in prayer and silence.

Luke 20:27-38

Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. The second and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too. Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?” Jesus replied, “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection. But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”

Luke 20 sees Jesus accosted by the religious leaders, who seek to trip him up by asking awkward questions. The passage we have heard this morning is the third of these, following questions about the source of his authority and whether or not it is right to pay taxes to Caesar. It’s worth remembering here that Judaism has a strong tradition of encouraging commentary and interpretation, so Jesus would have been well used to these kinds of conversations, and while the religious leaders may have been acting in bad faith here, we shouldn't let this put us off engaging in healthy theological debate. Christianity has been heavily influenced by Greek philosophy and Enlightenment rationalism, and has developed a tendency to favour solid answers, so that Baptists are unusual in not insisting on detailed creeds and instead making space for different understandings, but the culture Jesus knew had an openness and curiosity, and I think it is something really important to hold on to.

So Jesus engages with the religious leaders, as he has been doing since childhood, but he seems to sense that they are not just in this for the love of the debate, and there are hidden traps in their words, because for the most part he doesn't really answer their questions, instead using them as a springboard to something else. Perhaps it feels like I'm being unfair to the religious leaders here, but the situation they propose is so wildly improbable that it just doesn’t feel like a genuine question. And at the end of this we are told that "nobody dared ask any more questions", which suggests that they have gone into this hoping to win and feel they have lost, but theological discourse shouldn't be a competition. We need to go into it genuinely willing to hear the other person, to learn from their perspective, and to respect them even if we do not agree with them, although that should not prevent us from offering a robust challenge to theology where it is harmful.

A bit more context may be helpful before we really start to unpack the passage, because we are specifically told that the religious leaders who were challenging Jesus were Sadducees, and that is not an incidental detail. There were three main groupings within the religious leaders of the time - the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. The Essenes are not directly named in the New Testament, perhaps as they lived away from the towns in monastic style communities, and so Jesus did not encounter them in the course of his roving ministry. Instead it was the Pharisees and the Sadducees, who between them were responsible for maintaining civil and religious life through the Sanhedrin council, that he interacted with. These two groups disagreed on a number of theological issues, including the question of resurrection, with the Pharisees believing in an afterlife and the Sadducees denying it, another reason that their question seems disingenuous, intended to make an idea they reject look absurd and likely to generate more heat than light. This disagreement could at times become so fierce that when Paul spoke about resurrection in the Sanhedrin, he sparked a riot and had to be rescued by a Roman commander who feared he would be torn to pieces.

With that background in mind, it is bold of Jesus to offer any kind of response, rather than running half a mile, and it is bolder still that he so clearly affirms resurrection. The simple answer to the Sadducees’ question seems to be that the woman will not be married to any of her husbands in the age to come, because marriage is something that is for earthly life not eternal life. Perhaps that is a blessed relief to some but a crushing disappointment for others. For what it is worth, I don't think it means that we won't be with our loved ones in eternity, but rather that our relationships will be transformed. Modern understandings of marriage might emphasise love, but marriage laws at the time of Christ were largely about ownership, hence the reference to being given in marriage, so perhaps what Jesus is saying is that we will no longer define our relationships by contracts, because all will be love.

So there will be no marriage and there will be no death, for we will be like angels as the children of the resurrection...and that is all we get. It is kind of frustrating that Jesus doesn't take this opportunity to tell us more about the age to come, or what we might more usually call heaven, but I think that was probably intentional. It is not good for us to become so fixated on what comes next that we lose sight of what is now. We need to stay invested in "life before death", as the old Christian Aid motto put it. I think that is true for two main reasons. First, there is much work to be done now. We are called to love mercy and act justly, and we can only do that if we are deeply engaged with the world as it is. And second, there is much joy to be had now. Life is not perfect but it can be beautiful, and God wants us to be fully alive in the bodies which have been so fearfully and wonderfully made. 

Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him”. We may not be able to imagine eternity, but I think what we can say from the tiny snippets we get is that it is not just tinkering around the edges of our present reality. As the Lutheran pastor David Lose says, “The ordinary events and relationships by which we track our journey through this mortal life - marriage, childbirth, graduations, retirements and so on - do not characterize our eternal lives because resurrection life is not merely an extension of this life but something wholly different.” It feels strange to have so little to say on one of the biggest questions of life and faith, and generally speaking I do like to know what I'm getting myself into, but on this one I am willing to trust that whatever God has prepared will be better than I could ever imagine.

Having given a fairly cursory answer to the Sadducees’ question, Jesus takes the conversation in a different direction, declaring “he is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive”. We could tie ourselves up in theological knots trying to work out precisely what that means in a metaphysical sense, but I think what is most important on an emotional level is that it means that in some way God keeps our loved ones present. They are not lost to him, and so they are not truly lost to us. The beginning of November is sometimes known as Remembrancetide, incorporating All Saints and All Souls as well as Remembrance Day, and so this seems a good moment to hear this reading, and the assurance that God still holds the dead in love, just as we do. It also seems a good moment to reflect on resurrection as an aspect of God’s justice, a way of redeeming in eternity the grief and the violence that accompanies so much of our earthly lives.

I want to end with a footnote to this passage, because the debates with the Sadducees are followed by a warning about teachers of the law. Jesus says, “Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honour at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. These men will be punished most severely.” I really think this should be in the lectionary, because it is important for congregations to hear that their ministers are not infallible. We're not all greedy hypocrites, and most of us are genuinely doing our best, but it's really important that you test what we say and you watch what we do, and you discern for yourselves. We started with the importance of debate and commentary and interpretation, and that is something we all get to take part in as a community of faith.