For much of the Gospel of Luke, the scribes and the Pharisees have been trying to cancel Jesus. For anyone who might need a quick refresher, the Pharisees were the reform movement in Judaism at that time. Their goal was to teach Israel to obey God’s word well enough that God would bless his people and make them an independent nation again with an heir of David on the throne in Jerusalem. As part of this, they created the institution of the synagogue, which is the model for church as we know it, to teach the word of God to the people of God. They were held in high esteem by most Jews for their knowledge of Scripture and their personal holiness, even though most Jews weren’t interested in matching the Pharisaic standard of personal holiness. The scribes, meanwhile, were the religious scholars of the day; modern translations often refer to them as “teachers of the Law” or “lawyers.” The reason they’re always mentioned in tandem with the Pharisees is that most of them, understandably enough, were Pharisees.
So, for maybe fifteen chapters now, the scribes and the Pharisees have been trying to trip Jesus up. You might say they’ve been playing a long-running game of “Jesus Jeopardy” . . . and they’re riding an unbroken losing streak. They are the anti-Ken Jennings. Here in Luke 20, their great rivals the Sadducees decide to try to take advantage of their ongoing failure.
The Sadducees show up a lot less in the gospels—this is their first appearance in Luke—because they were much less of a popular presence than the Pharisees. They were the priestly party. They were descendants of Zadok; he was the first high priest in Solomon’s temple, and when the exiles returned from Persia to Jerusalem and the temple was re-established, the priesthood was restricted to his descendants. In Jesus’ day, not all of them were priests, but they were all aristocrats; they rubbed shoulders with the Romans who ruled the land, and had absorbed a lot of Greco-Roman culture as a consequence.
Along with a great cultural divide was a great theological divide between the Pharisees and the Sadducees; at the root of it was their understanding of the word of God. To the Sadducees, the only thing that counted as Scripture was the Torah, the five books of Moses; the word “torah” is usually translated “law,” since it does include the code of laws for the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, but we would do better to understand it as “teaching” or “instruction.” In any case, everything that established the power and privileges of the priestly class was to be found in the books of Moses, so the Sadducees were dismissive of everything else. The Pharisees, by contrast, accepted everything we know as the Old Testament and more besides; they also held to their oral tradition, which they called the oral Torah, claiming it also came from Moses at Sinai but was passed down orally from generation to generation instead of being written down.
This great difference in the size of their respective Bibles led to significant theological differences between Pharisees and Sadducees. They found common ground in their view of Jesus—both groups came to the firm conviction he had to go—but not on much else. Of particular importance for our passage this morning is that the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead (at least for faithful Jews), when God would judge the nations, purify the world, and set all things right, with his people at the center of everything. Since they drew this belief from the prophets, not from the Torah, the Sadducees would have none of it. As far as they were concerned, you lived, you died, and that was the end of it. Since the doctrine of the resurrection was a popular one, that probably contributed to the Sadducees’ lack of influence among the common people, but that didn’t bother them; they didn’t care what the rabble thought anyway.
Given that, it’s no surprise that when the Sadducees decide to play their own round of Jesus Jeopardy to show their idiot rivals how the thing should be done, they tried to use a question about the resurrection of the dead to do so. Indeed, the question feels like their favorite stumper, the one they pull out when they need to win the argument and shut the Pharisees up. The context of this question is a practice known as levirate marriage: if a married man who died childless had a younger brother who was not married, that younger brother had to marry his widowed sister-in-law to produce an heir for the older brother. We see this in practice in Genesis 38, the story of Judah and Tamar, and it’s included in the law code in Deuteronomy 25.
The Sadducees, as one does when one is trying to win an argument by any means necessary, take this to the point of absurdity—seven brothers! They even leave the last one childless, which seems gratuitous hard luck on everyone. Then they say, in effect, “OK, Teacher, you’re so smart—you believe in the resurrection, so tell us! Whose wife will she be?” The subtext is obvious: one woman with seven husbands would be in flagrant violation of the laws God laid down about marriage. Since any resurrection of the dead would produce such scenarios (if not, perhaps, any quite as extreme as this one), clearly resurrection would violate the Torah. Either Jesus walks back his teaching on the resurrection of the dead or he shows himself disobedient to God’s word; either way, the Sadducees have a way to discredit him with the people of Israel.
. . . Or so they think. As it plays out, they discover that what was true for the Pharisees is true for them as well: Jesus doesn’t play by anyone else’s script. Luke drops Jesus’ opening comment, that the Sadducees are in error because they know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. Instead, he goes right to the first point of Jesus’ argument: marriage is for this age, not for the age to come, because those raised from the dead will no longer die.
We could take a lot of time talking about this—rather more than we have this morning, in fact—which would be a problem because it wouldn’t really fit with our focus this season on the kingdom of God, and because it’s not in truth what this passage is about. That said, though, I can’t just wave it off. It’s too powerful a hook on our attention—and maybe for me more than most. It’s been a few years since I preached a wedding homily—some of y’all were there for Marc and Krysta—but you might not be surprised to hear I’ve been thinking a lot lately about preaching one. My eldest informed me several weeks ago that she and Ben have chosen Revelation 21 as the text for their service, saying happily, “Doesn’t that sound like a great passage for a wedding sermon?” It’s a great passage for many things, no question, and I’ve used it for a number of funerals, but the thought of it as a wedding scripture had never previously occurred either to me or to any couple I’ve married. And yet, with that bubbling in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help noticing that Jesus is making a parallel connection, talking about marriage in the light of the resurrection of the dead and the new creation.
Given that, I think there are two aspects to mention here. First, every scholar I’ve read explains Jesus’ argument this way: God ordained marriage so people would have children so humanity wouldn’t die out; since people will no longer die, that means marriage will no longer be necessary. This is certainly true: God did ordain marriage so people would have children. That’s a countercultural statement in our individualistic culture, which largely understands marriage as a legal construct existing for the purpose of self-actualization. But, you know, Jesus doesn’t actually say that. It’s certainly an inference to be drawn from the statement “they will no longer die,” but he doesn’t make it explicit; and I don’t think it’s the only inference to draw here.
Besides the biological aspect to marriage, there’s a relational aspect which is also clear in Scripture. To put the matter in New Testament terms, in our fallen world, Christian marriage is supposed to be a model of the relationship between Christ and the church. And while the doctrine of the Trinity is not explicit in the New Testament, I think we can also say marriage is supposed to be a model of the love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Of course, since every marriage I’ve ever heard of was between two human beings, every one of them was at best a highly imperfect model. In an ideal marriage, we would be able to drop all our defenses in mutual unconditional surrender and know one another fully, hiding nothing and disguising nothing, but that would require ideal people and that ain’t us. All the same, marriage is an arena in which God calls us toward that reality, and good marriages do serve that purpose, even if imperfectly; but that purpose, too, will pass away in the new creation, in part because people will no longer die. Our sin will no longer get in the way of our knowing one another and letting ourselves be fully known, and death will no longer cut short our opportunities to do so.
Jesus could have stopped here, because he’s done enough to answer the Sadducees’ question: their pet scenario does not in fact present a conflict with the Torah. But he doesn’t just want to answer their question, he wants to question their understanding, for they have fundamentally misunderstood the whole idea of the resurrection of the dead. To be fair, they got the idea from the Pharisees, who probably misunderstood it as well, but that doesn’t mean Jesus will let them off lightly. He doesn’t just want to shut them up, he wants to blow their minds, which he does with a stunning declaration: resurrection isn’t just a future promise, it’s a present reality.
He bases this on an appeal to Moses, to the book of Exodus, so the Sadducees have to listen. I wouldn’t be surprised if he left them scratching their heads, though, because he makes a challenging argument. What he draws from Exodus 3 is that though the patriarchs are dead, they are still alive—but he presents this as evidence to support the proposition that “the dead rise.” How does that follow? After all, even if Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still alive, they have not been raised from the dead.
Unfortunately, we have the tendency here to kick ourselves into a briar patch and get all hung up on the thorns. I was taught as a kid, as I suspect most of you who grew up in the church were taught, that when your body dies, your immortal soul goes up to heaven and you have this spiritual existence. If the church or churches in which you grew up got around to bodily resurrection of believers at all—I don’t think mine ever did—it was tacked on later and tied in with the Rapture in some way. This is popular theology, but it’s scripturally dubious. Body/spirit dualism is Platonism—or Gnosticism—not anything we see anywhere in Scripture. It’s also nothing that would have impressed the Sadducees, because it’s not the same as resurrection.
So where does that leave us? For my part, I believe Jesus’ point is this: the resurrection of the dead is a present reality to God even though it’s a future reality to us. We implicitly assume, perfectly naturally, that “heaven” is keeping time along with us, but I’m convinced that’s not the case at all. God is not timebound, at least by our time. For us, there’s a gap between the time when a believer dies and the time when the dead in Christ are raised, but that gap is only an artifact of our perspective. For the Author of the great story, when he raises each of his beloved characters out of this book into the greater reality, there is no gap at all.
This, I think, helps make sense of Jesus’ statement in verse 36, “They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection.” Shouldn’t it be the other way around? But notice, it’s a present-tense statement. Those who will be raised from the dead are already children of the resurrection—to God, that is present reality—and it is, will be, in the resurrection that we move into the full reality that we are God’s children. In this world, we are born toward dying; by God’s grace, we are born again in this age by the power of the Spirit of God; and we will be born again in the fullest sense into the age to come in being raised from the dead.
The Sadducees, of course, didn’t believe that, but they had nothing more to say; they slunk off, defeated, to the applause of the teachers of the Law—who were, remember, probably Pharisees. They don’t like Jesus, but they don’t like the Sadducees either, and the Sadducees had showed up intending to humiliate the Pharisees in the very act of tripping up their common enemy. To see them humiliated instead, made to look every bit the fools the Pharisees believed them to be . . . well, German didn’t exist yet, so no one knew the word schadenfreude, but I’m sure the Pharisees took pleasure in the Sadducees’ public faceplant all the same.
So, then, what do we do with this? It’s easy to read this passage as only about “heaven” and not about this world, but even if we were to grant that, it would still have implications for our life in this world. Is the saying “If you’re too heavenly-minded, you’ll be no earthly good” familiar to anyone? There’s truth to it, but the problem it identifies isn’t actually being “heavenly-minded” at all. Rather, the problem is an idea of “heaven” which is really all about this world. I’ve debated using this, and I won’t keep it up very long, but this is the “map of heaven” by an artist named Malachi Ward.
We need to understand that what the Bible has in view is not the unnerving theme park Ward satirically envisions nor an otherworldly “spiritual” existence. This is not about “heaven” as some realm distinct from Earth. Rather, it’s about Revelation 21: all things new, resurrection shattering the walls of the world and casting death down from its throne, all creation reborn as it was meant to be: the total victory of God over sin and death.
I have two things I want to suggest to you in closing. One, worldly heavens—like Ward’s—make a heavenless world. The Sadducees weren’t wrong about that: the sort of resurrection they understood the Pharisees to be envisioning would be problematic. Such worldly heavens collapse the resurrection of the dead from triumphant restoration of divine shalom to a setting for a bad soap opera—or an episode of the Jerry Springer show, for those who remember that shining example of daytime television. They trivialize this world, they trivialize our lives, and so breed a parochial faith in a parochial God.
Two, Jesus turns the Pharisees and Sadducees inside-out, because he turns the whole question inside-out. One group believed in the resurrection, one didn’t, but both imagined the age to come to be “much like the present, only longer,” to quote the great relief pitcher Dan Quisenberry. What we see in the Sadducees’ risible little scenario—which the Pharisees couldn’t answer—is a resurrection in which those who are raised from the dead are raised essentially unchanged. It’s an age to come which is still hobbled by all the limitations of this present age.
What Jesus gives us is completely different. The kingdom of God is a kingdom of resurrection—a kingdom of total resurrection, not just of individuals into the same old world as we know it, but of that whole world, the earth beneath our feet and the heavens above, sun and solar system and whirling galaxies. In him, and through him into us, that kingdom of resurrection is breaking into this kingdom of death. That resurrection which for us is yet to come is already present for God, and in God; that life which has forever overcome death and can no longer die is poured into us, in the midst of this world in which all things die and no good thing lasts forever.
If we let it capture our imaginations, this changes how we see everything. I still haven’t figured out how to preach a wedding homily on Revelation 21, but it’s a fitting thing to do, to unfurl a vision of marriage that points forward to the day when we will see all things new. Our world is not a temporary home which we will leave behind to go sit on clouds and play harps, it is the site and subject of God’s work of redemption and resurrection, which he calls us to steward as best we can as an act of faithfulness to him. Even death, our mortal enemy, is made ultimately a mere necessary precursor to resurrection—and when the dead are raised and the world made new, then as the preacher-poet John Donne said, “death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”
I’ve said for a long time that when my time comes to die, just put me in a pine packing crate, stamp “Return to Sender” on the top, and lower me down. I realize there are pragmatic and environmental reasons for burial vaults, expensive coffins, and the various regulations and practices which make burials so expensive, but they are also products of the sense that we are doing something final and irrevocable, and they serve to reinforce that feeling of finality. As citizens of the kingdom of resurrection, however, we need to affirm that these wooden boxes are not final, they are only temporary. As we’ll sing in a few minutes, “these wooden tombs, we’ll break them soon and fashion them into flower beds.” I love that image of the ultimate inversion: containers of death transformed into incubators of life.
“Kings’ Fairy Tale,” Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, 1909; image has been cropped to fit. Public domain.
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