Sermon preached at St. Alban's, Spirit Lake, on November 11, 2007
(Proper 27, Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, BCP Lectionary)
by the Rev. Carl D. Mann

Texts:   Job 19:23-27a
2 Thessalonians 2:13-3:5
Luke 20:27-38
Psalm 17

"We must not think of heaven in terms of this earth. Life there will be quite different, because we will be quite different. It would save a mass of misdirected ingenuity, and not a little heartbreak, if we ceased to speculate on what heaven is like and left things to the love of God." So says William Barclay as he paraphrases Jesus' response to the Sadducees in today's Gospel.

Now before Jesus arrives in Jerusalem for his final days, his main adversaries have been the Scribes and Pharisees who have continually dogged him from town to town trying to trip him up in speech and action. But now that he is in Jerusalem for the duration, the Sadducees raise their ugly heads.

The Sadducees were not the same as the Scribes and the Pharisees. The Pharisees were a very religious group and not all that political. They didn't really give a camel's hump as to who was in charge of the government as long as they were left to freely carry out the ceremonial law as they saw fit and of which they followed to the letter. They accepted both the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew scripture, and the writings of the Prophets as authoritative, and relied heavily on the oral tradition in order to bolster their understanding of the scripture. In particular, they believed in the resurrection of the body after death which was a concept not fully revealed or developed in the Old Testament, and specifically not mentioned in the Torah. The Scribes were those who helped to interpret the Law much like lawyers do today. And one can take that anyway he or she wants depending on what your opinions of lawyers are. In any case, the Scribes and the Pharisees had little regard for the Sadducees.

The Sadducees, on the other hand, were a small group of wealthy men, most of them probably priests, who made up a large part of the Great Sanhedrin, which was the indigenous governing body of the Jews during the time of Jesus. They collaborated with the Roman government much as King Herod did in order to maintain their wealth and social status. So it would be safe to say that they were probably despised just as much as the tax collector whom we have been discussing the past two weeks. The Sadducees only accepted the Torah with its written law as authoritative scripture, holding the Prophets in much lower regard, and rejecting the oral tradition altogether. Since there was no direct mention of resurrection in the Torah they rejected any notion of it as well as anybody who held the belief hence their enmity toward the Scribes and the Pharisees.

So because of this enmity, even though they were trying to trap Jesus into saying something that could be used against him in court, they also used this moment to yank the chains of the Scribes and Pharisees by asking the question about a woman with seven husbands because they thought that any answer to the question would make the whole idea of resurrection appear to be absurd. If Jesus said that the woman would have all seven brothers as husbands in the afterlife, this would alienate a large portion of the following crowd because even though one could imagine a man having seven wives, no woman would be allowed to have seven husbands.

Now in Deuteronomy, the Mosaic Law states that if a man dies without an heir then his brother shall take the widow as his wife and father a son for his brother. The firstborn son of that union is to bear the name of the deceased brother so that his lineage might continue. In this way did the Sadducees see immortality and resurrection; a man could only live forever as long as a son could be "raised up" to carry on his name.

So the trap has been set, and the bait has been taken by Jesus. But as we have seen many times recently, Jesus turns the argument back on his adversaries.

First of all, Jesus points out that the way in which the question has been framed assumes that the resurrection will be an extension of life as we know it here on earth; if we are married on earth why wouldn't we be married in heaven? This shows the limitations of the Sadducees knowledge. Why do we have marriage in this world? In the prayer book it says that "The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God's will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord." Procreation is one third of a divine trinity of reasons for Holy Matrimony intended by God in order to sustain the human race in "this age" because this world in this age is a place in which people die. But in "that age," the age to come, the age of the resurrection, people will not die and therefore have no need to "marry or to be given in marriage." No longer will we need to reproduce in order to perpetuate our names because we will all be children and heirs of God. No longer will we need to find our joy or help or comfort in another person because all of our needs for intimacy will be met in our relationship with God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now this is not to say that we will not see or be with our spouse or loved ones. It is just that our relationship with them will not be the same. How exactly? We don't know because resurrection life will be full of happiness beyond what we are able to comprehend or imagine in this world.

Jesus goes on to say that we will be like angels. Not that we will become angels; when we die we won't sprout wings or suddenly have a penchant for playing stringed instruments or whatever it is that we imagine angels do. But rather we will be like angels in that we will not be subject to death. Angels are immortal, spiritual beings and part of the created order of God, and Jesus is purposely throwing this description into the conversation to tweak the Sadducees because not only do they not believe in the resurrection, they don't believe in angels or spiritual beings either.

Now you can just about see the Scribes and Pharisees, who have been giving Jesus what-for during his entire ministry, over on the sidelines going, "Yes! Give it to them, Jesus! Go on and rub their noses in it! Turn the tables on them just like you've been doing to us!"

And he does. Jesus wraps it up by using the Torah to explain the resurrection to the Sadducees. In Exodus when Moses encounters God in the burning bush, God Himself speaks of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the present tense even though they have been dead for so long therefore they must be still living because now, right now, God is the God of the living and not of the dead.

So what are we to take home from this story? It's not exactly about discipleship but it does touch on faith as we have been discussing it these past two weeks. But it's really about hope. Hope in the resurrection of which Jesus Christ is the first fruits. Today's collect says it well: The Son, the second person of the Trinity came into this world in order to destroy the works of the devil of which the primary work is death. Because of our listening to the devil we chose to disobey God and because of that disobedience our bodies age and decay, and eventually quit working. But God gave us the gift of marriage between a man and a woman signifying "the mystical union betwixt Christ and his Church." Just as the bride and groom perpetuate life through the procreation of children, so too, through the resurrected Christ and his Church are we born again and made children of God and heirs to eternal life.

Do we understand exactly how it works or exactly how it will be? No, we don't. We can only speculate, which unfortunately has produced more harm than good. We would be better off if we left things to the love of God.

As the Apostle Paul says to the Corinthians, "Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now [in this age] we see in a mirror, dimly, but then [in the age of the resurrection] we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love."

Gloria Patri