Wrong About Resurrection

Luke 20:27-38

It’s hard to keep politics out of the pulpit when Jesus gets himself embroiled in Temple politics – which is what we are hearing about today.

This conversation about resurrection and marriage that Luke reports on today happens when Jesus has traveled to Jerusalem to come face to face with the forces that are going to kill him (and, not incidentally, lead to resurrection).

He’s been teaching in the Temple every day: sitting down with his disciples and a crowd of the curious in the Temple grounds, telling stories, interpreting scripture, and being challenged to debate by other religious leaders and teachers who disagree with him.
Now the Sadducees – a group made up mostly of the religious elite in Jerusalem – come to test him on this idea of the dead being raised by God at the last day that’s grown popular among the faithful people of their time.

Sadducees don’t believe in resurrection, you see, because they can’t find it mentioned in the “books of Moses” – the books we now know as the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures. All the prophets and sacred histories and poetry that comes after – that you and I read in our Bibles, and that other Jews read in synagogue at the time of Jesus – none of that counts, according to the Sadducees. And they have a power conflict with the Pharisees about that.

So they tell Jesus a bizarre hypothetical story – about a woman married over and over by a family of brothers – that’s designed to make resurrection look ridiculous. Look, this one woman can’t be married to seven men at the same time when they’re all alive again! Ridiculous! Right?
It’s a trap to make resurrection logically impossible and prove that they, the Sadducees, are right about God.

If you defeat your opponent’s arguments; make someone look ridiculous in a debate, it means that you’re right, doesn’t it?

(That’s the premise we still follow when we put a whole bunch of candidates for election on stage and moderators and debaters all try to trip each other up).

And it matters to be right – or to be on the team of the winning debater – because our salvation depends on being right.

Or even if we know that’s not literally true, at least that’s how it feels.

This year in America, it sounds like if we don’t pick the right debater, you or I or someone we love is going to die of bad health care with the wrong people in charge. Or melt, starve, and smother because of the wrong balance between climate care and economic growth.  Other times the existential threat is Communists or terrorists or nuclear war; paroled criminals or deficit and debt.

There’s immense cultural pressure on many of us to “get it right” – to back the right choices, to be morally and practically correct in what we do with our votes, money, parenting, recycling, medical decisions, everything… so that we can secure our future and the future of those we love and maybe even the future of the human race.

In other words, so we can assure ourselves of salvation from death, evil, error, and despair.

For the Sadducees, it mattered that they be right about resurrection because if they were wrong about that, they might be wrong about how God teaches us to live, and where God is revealed in scripture. Salvation – ultimate relationship with God and feeling right and confident about our life choices – depends on this, for them. So they try to bring Jesus into an argument between themselves and the Pharisees; prove themselves more right than their opponents about God, and reassure themselves that they’re getting their own salvation right.

Temple politics mattered in Jesus’ time for the same reason religious and secular politics matter in our own: because we care about protecting ourselves, our families, our friends from evil and harm – in other words, because we care about our own salvation. We care about our physical, practical, immediate protection from danger and evil; and we care about the assurance of our future, assurance of peace and comfort and reward in heaven and on earth. And so we argue with one another, and sometimes even with Jesus, trying to assure ourselves that we’ve got it right.

But saving ourselves is not actually our job.

And that’s the concern that Jesus answers when he tells the Sadducees that nobody marries in the resurrection. Jesus isn’t telling us that we won’t still love and be intimate with our spouses and children in eternal life with God, but that resurrection is so different from what we know that in resurrection we have no need of the rules and customs and institutions meant to extend and secure our mortal life – the customs meant to save ourselves and our families, our communities.

In Jesus’ time, marriage was as much a life-insurance policy as it was anything else. Children were regarded as the only guarantee that you would live on and not be forgotten after death, and a spouse and children were the best – maybe only – investment you could make in protection for old age or illness.

That was the whole point of this brother-in-law marriage, you know: to provide a secure future for both the widow and the dead man.

But in resurrection, we never have to worry again about the threat of death. Never have to worry about securing our future, or the future of those we love.

Jesus is telling the Sadducees, the disciples, the crowds in the Temple – and you and me here and now – that God has a plan for our salvation – for the assurance of our future and the future of those we love – that doesn’t depend on any of the strategies or rules or customs we use to protect ourselves and our families from death and distress.

Jesus is also telling the Sadducees, and you and me, that we don’t have to be right about God to experience salvation. They can be wrong about resurrection and still be raised. They – we – can be wrong about what scripture is the right scripture and still grow right with God through what we learn in the scripture we do read.

They – we – can lose the argument, lose control of the conversation, and God can still choose us to be children of God, people through whom God heals and saves the world.

You and I and a whole lot of people around us can be wrong about which debater should be president, or sheriff, or control the legislature, and God can still assure the future of those we love in ways we never would have asked or imagined – even in ways we thought would be wrong.

In fact, Jesus tells the Sadducees, tells you and me, that we don’t have to be right about God; don’t have to be right in any argument; in any of the differences that make up our religious and secular politics then or now), in order to assure our own salvation or the future of those we love. Because that salvation, that future, are already fully held in God’s hands.

So the Sadducees can stop defending themselves against new scripture, and new teachings about resurrection. You and I can stop defending ourselves against people on the internet, the news, or the ballot who disagree with us. We can stop trying to be right, or prove ourselves right, and be free to know ourselves – and everyone who disagrees with us! – as loved, assured, and saved by the God we’re probably wrong about, but who insists on giving us life anyway, now and always.