Sermon preached at New Life Presbyterian Church, Omaha, Nebraska, November 10, 2013.
Scripture is Job 19:23-27a, Luke 20:27-38
This sermon shows some distinct influence of my recent reading of "Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth" by Reza Aslan.
My father was fond of
saying that when some people get to heaven, God will have to put them in a
cage. Because they will believe they are
the only ones there!
People believe a lot of
different things about life after life, most of them not Biblical in the least!
I have my own ideas about heaven, maybe a combination of a Starbucks and a
really, really good Chinese restaurant?
Maybe not.
Well the Sadducees didn’t
believe in heaven or resurrection at all.
The Sadducees were the real religious elite, the group that controlled
the Temple. The Temple was the one place
that God could be worshiped, where sacrifices of animals could be offered. The Sadducees were installed by the Roman
authorities and the high priest came from their number. They were the establishment to end all
establishments.
This story takes place
after Jesus has entered Jerusalem. The
first thing Jesus did when he came to Jerusalem? Do you know?
He went straight to the Temple and drove out all the money changers and
all the people that were selling things in the Temple. He broke open the cages and set free the
sacrificial animals. In other words,
Jesus directly changes the Temple elite, the Sadducees, saying, “It is written,
‘My house shall be a house of prayer’ but you have made it a den of
robbers!” Luke tells us that, “Everyday he
was teaching in the temple. The chief priests, the scribes and the leaders of
the people kept looking for a way to kill him.”
So they tried to question him,
tried to trip him up.
And this story that the
Sadducees tell Jesus, about a woman who marries seven brothers in succession is
not an something that really happened, but the most ridiculous example they can
make up to mock Jesus’ belief in the resurrection of the dead. “Teacher, there was this woman and she married
a man and he died, so according to the Law of Moses, she married his
brother. Now he also died and there were
5 other brothers and she married each one in succession, seven in all! Seven husbands. Now in the resurrection, whose wife will she
be?"
It’s a good thing the
Sadducees didn’t ask me this question, because my first response would have
been, “What has she been feeding these guys?”
But Jesus is smarter than the Sadducees, smarter than me,
fortunately. He doesn’t fall into the
trap to play their little intellectual games.
Are the Sadducees,
suggesting a heavenly version of polyandry, when a woman has multiple,
simultaneous husbands? No. They are mocking a belief they don’t
share. They didn’t believe that the
resurrection of the dead existed. So they tried to mock a heavenly belief with
an earthly problem.
They were trying to drag
Jesus down with a problem, whose wife will she be?
The Sadducees are making
an assumption about heaven. Every joke
I’ve ever heard about heaven, makes the same assumption. Every movie I’ve ever seen that depicts
heaven makes the same assumption. Most
things that people like you and me believe about heaven makes the same
assumption.
That assumption is that in
heaven, we aren’t that different than we are now. We will have the same problems, the same relationships,
the same arguments. “Whose wife will she
be?” Who will she belong to?” “Who is better? Methodists or Presbyterians?”
Jesus is smarter than
that. Jesus refuses to make an earthly
problem a heavenly problem. Because in
heaven, there are no problems! Jesus
says, “Those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the
resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they
cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being
children of the resurrection.”
Jesus is not saying that
we stop loving who we love on earth in heaven; he is saying that love is now
perfect. Instead of just loving the
handful of people we love in our lifetime; we will love as God loves, because we
will see each other as God sees us.
Jesus is teaching
something really dangerous here. In
God’s eyes our worth is not determined by who we are fortunate to marry or who
we are fortunate be. Our worth is
determined because we are children of God.
God is not some cosmic bean counter determining who is more worthy, who
is more privileged; God is mercy and love beyond any words I can possibly give
to the ideas of mercy and love. Jesus
knows this. Jesus came so that we will
know this. Jesus is this.
The Sadducees caught up in
the Temple structure, in the day to day operations of this elaborate place of
worship, more richly decorated, more elaborate and detailed oriented and power
structured than any church, any temple, any synagogue, any mosque in existence
in the world today. The Sadducees
cooperated with the Roman authorities, kept the people in line and were allowed
to continue this elaborate system of worship as long as the Romans got their
cut. Sounds like the tax collectors we
were talking about just last week, doesn’t it?
Except that the Sadducees got to keep their status in the community. Jesus, Jesus was a threat, to the Sadducees
and to their Roman overlords. They asked
this question to mock this threat.
Jesus is still a threat to
the powers of this world. Jesus is still
a threat to those who would keep some people down so others may thrive. Jesus is still a threat to those who would
use others for their own greed. Jesus is
still a threat to you and to me when we believe that our own faith gives us a
privilege makes us more beloved of God than God’s other children. To God, all of us are God’s children. To God, all of us are alive.
We too, must be a threat
to the world. Not to threaten the world
with violence, but with love. Not to
threaten the world with violence and hate, but to threaten the world with what
God in Jesus offers the world: love, understanding,
mercy.
Amen.
