The Sadducees come to Jesus with what they hoped would be a “gotcha” question. In the verses immediately prior, Luke says that the religious leaders had been trying to trap him by what he said in public. The first test was a question about whether to pay taxes to Cesar. He had them show him a coin, which had Caesar’s inscription on it, and said “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” The first question was a political trap. The second question is a theological test. And while resurrection was believed by many Jewish people at the time, the question comes from the Sadducees, a subset of leaders who do not believe in the resurrection.
The question is “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally, the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”
As wild as this scenario sounds, it is based on the law given by God to Moses in Deuteronomy 25:5-10 and is called Levirate marriage, a practice intended to protect widows by ensuring in a patriarchal society that they had a protector and provider. It also carried on the line of the deceased brother. And the Sadducees may have been drawing from a story in the book of Tobit, of a woman with seven husbands who all die before producing heirs.
While the book of Tobit, as part of what we now call the deuterocanonical books or the Apocrypha would not have been considered holy scripture by the Sadducees, the story would have been well known at the time.
But the Sadducees’ question came from a place of trying to stump Jesus, to use an extreme situation that could arise under the to show what they think of as the absurdity of the resurrection. They want Jesus and the listeners to think to themselves—that does sound ridiculous—therefore there must not be a resurrection of the dead at all.
However instead of getting caught in the trap and engaging with the intricacies of this hypothetical, Jesus responded by reframing what the resurrection will be like. In the resurrection, there will not be marriage. We don’t need to sort out who will be married to whom between the woman and the 7 husbands, because marriage won’t exist. What was seen and is still seen as a foundational relationship of current society won’t exist at all.
While there is still so much that we don’t know about what the resurrection will be like, Jesus invites us to expand our imagination. The resurrection will not be a repetition or replica of this life, but a new creation entirely. A restoration of all things. A new pattern and way of interacting with each other and with God.
Our current world is so deeply shaped by sin that there will be a lot of things that will look different in the resurrected life, when there is no more sin. For instance, the laws of levirate marriage, which was a blessing to widows at the time is not needed. In addition to there not being death, there will not be inequality or suffering that required those laws in the first place. That is hard to envision. What would that kind of life be like?
Jesus teaches us three things about the resurrection to start to stretch and fuel our imagination of what our resurrected life will be like.
1) The first is that we can no longer die. This might seem obvious, but it is really profound. There are many religious traditions that believe in life after death, but that life also comes to an end. Jesus is clarifying that he is NOT talking about reincarnation. This is not a cycle of living dying, living and dying again. This is life, one death, and then resurrected life forever, when we will never die again.
Although, of course, we all know we will die and all know loved ones who have died, most of us are much more removed from death today than people in antiquity who were hearing Jesus’ words. The average life expectancy at the time was around 35 years old, due especially to high rates of infant and childhood mortality. Death lurked at every corner. And death wasn’t happening out of view, in hospital rooms and nursing homes like it is today.
How much more would the hearers resonate with this idea of death being no more.
But even for us today, when you really stop to think about it, how much of our life now is shaped by the inevitability of death? We shape much of our lives around maintaining our health or providing for our loved ones after our death or building a legacy to outlast us.
But in the resurrection, we will not need to build up provision for our eventual and inevitable decline, because it will never come. We will live without fear of our own deaths or the deaths of those whom we love. And there will be no decay. Other parts of scripture say directly that there will be no sickness or pain anymore. What a blessing!
What freedom we will have in the resurrection to have the weight of those worries removed.
2) The second thing Jesus teaches us about resurrection is that we are God’s children. While there won’t be marriage in the resurrection, there will be relationship, and the primary relationship that we will have, the one that defines us, will be the relationship we have to God as God’s beloved children.
I asked my almost 5-year old daughter about what it means for us to be children of God, and theologian Amara wisely said that it means that God loves us, and God wants to teach us to play.
Children carry deep wisdom. Amara is exactly right, God loves us as a parent loves a child, and there will be a playfulness in the resurrection with God. God is the creator. God painted the wings of the butterflies, patterned the stripes of the tigers, and designed the orbits of the planets. And I have to imagine that in the resurrected life with God there will be boundless creativity and discovery of this new creation. God will teach us again how to play and delight in creation.
And this title and relationship of being children of God is something that we can claim now, in this world. While it carries over into our resurrected life, it doesn’t start there. We are children of God right now. The language of being children of God permeates the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New. And in the liturgy of Baptism, we affirm that through baptism, each of us is adopted as God’s own children.
3) The third thing Jesus teaches us about resurrection is that God is the God of the Living.
This of course doesn’t mean that those who have died are not in the arms of God—quite the opposite. Those who have died, including Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all of our loved ones who have died are alive to God. In God, no one is lost.
God is the God of the living. Put another way, as Jesus does in John 11:25-26: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. 26 And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.”
Jesus is telling us about what he is about to do. Jesus died and rose again to conquer death for all of us forever.
“Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? […] But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor 15: 54-57)
God is the God of the Living, and in God we all have life everlasting.
Let us pray
Heavenly Father, you are the God of the Living. The day is coming when death will be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. You are making all things new. May we live even now in the sure hope of the resurrection as your beloved children, now and forever. Amen.