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Airport watching
My favorite thing about traveling is the airport experience. I love watching the people - Sitting waiting at the gate, observing the stories that unfold around me. Things that when they happen to me in my life totally hook me, are just interesting when they happen at the gate – screaming kid, kicking on the floor – I give a compassionate smile to the mother, husband who didn’t pack the travel snacks, go figure. Passenger going for it with the airline representative at the counter, raising his voice, belittling the employee – its an interesting study in power dynamics. This passage is a little bit like the airport for me. Its like walking in on someone else’s argument. Sadducees, one bride, seven brothers, resurrection day….We need to know more of the back story before we can feel the impact of the Jesus’ exchange.
One bride for seven brothers. Its just a wacky idea. Even in its 1st century context it was an exaggeration, but not as strange as it sounds to us. The Levirate marriage was a way of ensuring the family line continued. It provided protection for women. We need to understand, we are talking about a male-dominated society and marriage was a crucial element in maintaining continuity. The family was the center of relational, economic and social stability. The women’s role was to bear the children to perpetuate her husband’s family. If she was widowed, without kids, the Levirate plan “B” was for her to marry her dead husband’s brother. This created the possibility that her husband’s family line would continue and that she would have economic and social shelter. So, to the ears of the crowd gathered in the temple courts that day, the concept of a widow marrying her brother-in-law was pretty neutral, and playing out that she would marry all seven brothers was mocking of Jesus.
Jesus is a hick
So Luke tells us Jesus is out teaching and preaching in the temple courts. This was the market place of theological thought. Remember his accent, his clothes, his hair all give away the fact that he’s from the backwater town of Nazareth – this a detail not lost on the sophisticated urban crowd in Jerusalem. He is interacting with the various religious leaders and groups of the day.
Pharisees – pro-resurrection
The Pharisees were one of the key forces. They believed that it was good to interpret and extrapolate meaning from the Torah. In keeping with that they believed in the resurrection of the dead.
Sadducees – urban sophisticates
The Sadducees were in reaction with the Pharisees. The Sadducees seem to have been one of the more culturally sophisticated movements of their time[1]. Their followers were often the leading priestly families and the aristocracy. The Sadducees were more conservative than the Pharisees. They argued for literal interpretations of the scripture and rejected what they saw as Pharisaic speculation on the unknowable. (Let me share a little seminary secret – you can keep them straight because they were “sad you see” because they didn’t believe in an afterlife Sadducees).
Sadducees meet Jesus – resurrection signature issue
So today’s text finds the Sadducees approaching Jesus where he is teaching in the Temple courts. Strutting their intellectual stuff and this is their signature issue. We’ve all been in on these kinds of conversations. Some one with formal education and razor sharp intellect constructs a water tight argument, then they seal the deal with a question that you’d be a fool to answer in any way other than the way they want you to – you don’t think that we should leave a child behind do you? It seems as though the Sadducees are out for sport, some theological ping pong. Certainly more eager to prove their point and underscore their influence than anything else.
Jesus’ response is interesting – at the onset it is surprisingly flat. We can imagine the crowd wondering what he would do, doesn’t he understand what is at stake? would he fold or put up a fight? Who will this woman belong to in the resurrection? – what kind of a question is that! Jesus is thinking – There is no right answer to a wrong question!
Karl Barth (a reformed theologian from Switzerland) said “the Bible gives to every person and to every era such answers to their questions as they deserve. We shall always find in it as much as we seek and no more”[2] Anytime that we “use” God or the church or a point of view to determine winners and losers or to prove that we are better than others, we become participants in deadly game, life without God. We’re just batting around a ping pong ball, keeping our own score.
Some questions belong to the people who are truly famished for an answer. The question of what lies on the other side of death is one of them. It’s the people who admit to knowing crushing defeat, whose dignity and certainty have been deconstructed – these are the people who can begin to know the landscape of a dark world which only makes sense if Christ is raised.[3]
Paul Duke shares some great insights on this question. He points out that other people we read about in the Bible get a very different answer from Jesus to the resurrection question. Jesus tells Martha in her hour of grasping for hope at her brother’s grave – I am the resurrection.
To Mary Magdalene, blinded by tears outside another grave, Jesus gave the ultimate answer of her own name spoken from the other side of death.
When we ask the question with earnest tears in the shadow of death, we may hear our name for the answer. When we inquire about resurrection as though we are counting on the response to establish us as the most insightful and progressive Christians in the room, the answer we get may fall flat on our ears and we may wonder about whether the question was heard.
Jesus, in his compassion, does give the Sadducees a response. He turns their fool-proof argument inside out and lays out how they have missed the boat.
Jesus responds that there is an age that follows this one. And in the age to come we enter into God’s presence in a profound way. He invokes Moses encountering the burning bush. After he peers over the sand dune, Moses realizes that the moment has shifted from everyday to extraordinary and he pulls off his shoes because its all that he can think to do to respond to the fact that that the ground which he is standing on is holy. His face is flushed from the heat as the bush burns brightly and refuses to be consumed.
As Michael Pasquarello points out in his blog, Moses isn’t given answers to his questions or solutions to his problems. Instead, he finds himself standing in the presence of the God of Sarah and Abraham, the God of Rebecca and Isaac, the God of Leah and Rachel and Jacob – the God of the living.
In the age to come, Jesus explains, things work out differently in terms of relationship. Its no longer about having children to added to your credit, but being God’s children. Its no longer about establishing and preserving a position or a network of security and power, but being in God’s presence.
So maybe we don’t personally run into many Sadducees when we go to the Temple courts. After reading this text, I feel prepared to put them in their place if I run in to any.
Chances are, God will catch us just like Moses, unaware, going about our business. One minute 4 year old Eva’s telling me all about the pizza they had for lunch at school and then she’s asking “Where is Fuzzy Grandpa? Nana misses him…Where did he go when he died?
So I take a breath, pushing away the distraction of trying to preserve my position of power, I kneel down on the holy ground that has opened up next to her and gently lay out my hope for the life to come. She nods her assent and requests cheese sticks for a snack. The flames recede, the bush is just a bush again.
In terms of now, this afternoon, the week that lies before us I find that God is inviting us into deeper relationship.
God is inviting us to lay down our ping pong paddles, to set aside our needs to prove our points and protect our position.
God invites us to be vulnerable and earnest in our seeking.
Because as much as we are earnest, as much as we are vulnerable in our desire to know more of God, so too will God respond with the fullest of measures.
God promises to meet us in the shadows of our grief, the valleys of our doubt, the darkness of our night.
God meets us there with the Good News of resurrection and new life.
In the age to come, for sure and now.
Amen.
[1] First thoughts on Year C Gospel Passages from the Lectionary, Pentecost 24 – www.staff.murdoch.edu.au/-loader/lkpentecost24.htm
[2] Paul D. Duke, Transfigured relations – Live by the Word – Christian Century, October 25, 1995
[3] Carlyle Marney quoted by William Willimon, Paul Duke, Transfigured Relations
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