Sons of the Resurrection

Luke 20: 27-38

          Did you watch the Presidential debates last year? It’s not important whose side you were on. All that was decided last year at the ballot box. But the debates themselves were quite interesting, especially the second one. That was the debate that the sitting president pretty much blew. He was not well prepared and it showed. He didn’t measure his opponent or his knowledge well enough. In fact, the political scientists of the day said that if he didn’t recover in the last debate, that one event could decide the presidency.  

A similar point was hammered into me in law school. It was about trial law and it was this: In cross examination, never ask a question unless you already know the answer. That was a very good piece of advice. Every time I forgot it, I got reminded the hard way why I should have heeded that advice. I won about as many cases not asking the wrong question as I did asking the right question.

           Apparently some Sadducees in first century Palestine didn’t get the memo. Teacher, they say mockingly, Moses wrote the law. He said you have to marry your husband’s widow if he dies and you’re still single. He said you have to bear children with her. What happens when seven brothers marry the same woman and none bear children? Who is she with in heaven? The Sadducees were happy with themselves. They had come up with a riddle to stump the teacher.

          They had done it to the Pharisees. The Torah, the first five books of our Old Testament, was their bible. The passage they used was from Deuteronomy 25, which mandated such a practice. It required a brother to marry the widow of his brother to produce children, or seed.  No matter that almost certainly the practice was no longer used in Jesus’ day. There it was in the Old Testament law. The Sadducees paid no attention to the writings or the prophets. The recognized only the law. They did not believe in a bodily resurrection and they used that passage as one of their bases for denying the resurrection of the body. The Pharisees, who did believe in such a resurrection, had no comeback. If the law-fastidious Pharisees couldn’t give an answer, neither would Jesus.

          The Sadducees partially based their unbelief in some practical reasoning which went roughly like this: If there is a bodily resurrection, then we have our bodies in heaven. We must, therefore, have our relationships in heaven. That would include marriage. Marriage would include conjugal relations between spouses. For the Sadducees, the case of the seven brothers with one wife illustrated the sheer impossibility of sorting out such relationships, so bodily resurrection could not be true.  One can’t really fault the Sadducees for such reasoning. The problem is that it didn’t apply.

          Ever been around a know-it-all? I don’t mean someone smart and well prepared. I mean the kind of person who has some power and can’t be told anything. That person has all the answers. The Pharisees could be a pain in the side for all their legalism, but they were a religious body that rigorously studied all the scriptures of the time and cared nothing for personal gain. The Sadducees, on the other hand, were the ruling class of their people. They are mentioned only once by name in Luke’s gospel, but indirectly on a number of other occasions, for theirs was the sect from which came the high priests. They were very political and wealthy. They were used to being right because they wielded the power. The Sadducees were the know-it-alls of Jesus’ day, even more than the Pharisees.

So Jesus takes the priests to Bible school.  He talks of “this age” and “that age.” “This age” is the one in which we live, the one in which the Sadducees lived.  In this age, we marry and we are given in marriage. We have children. We have families. We die. “That age” is the age to come, the age in which, thanks to Jesus and the grace he brought to earth for us, we have one foot in the door, the age of the already, but not yet. As believers, we already participate in that life through our relationship with Jesus. The full expression of that life is yet to come. It awaits the promised second coming of our Savior and in that moment, our bodies, our resurrected bodies, will join our immortal souls in heaven. That is part of what awaits us in “that age.”

What’s it like to be in “that age?” Well, we don’t know a lot, but what we know is wonderful. Jesus tells the Sadducees and us that in heaven, there will be no marriage and no one given in marriage. There will be no death. He tells us that those who are resurrected from the dead…that’s right: Jesus refers specifically to the resurrection of the dead…will be equal to angels and sons of God, that we will be sons of the resurrection. These are not the revelations of Paul or Peter or John. They are not the predictions of some Old Testament prophet, as powerful as those testimonies and prophecies may be. They are the statements of Jesus Christ himself.

What is Jesus telling us? For one thing, he tells us that we cannot understand the character of heaven by understanding how things work on earth. Heaven is much more than a perfect earth. Heaven is not a daily string of 68’s on the golf course or a constant series of perfect shots at a 14 point buck or a size 2 dress figure. Heaven is wonderful, but the details are a mystery to us. Little has been revealed, and yet more than enough is known to make us hungry for it. We can infer from Jesus’ comments that earthly relationships, while instituted by God as one way in which we can begin to understand the love and character of our Creator, are not a barometer for heavenly relationships. On earth, we think of husbands and wives and brothers and sisters and children. In heaven, says Jesus, we are sons of God, sons of the resurrection. Does this mean that we will not recognize our loved ones? I doubt it. I just think it means that the most important, the most intimate, the most compelling, relationship, will be the one we each will share with our Savior and our God.

Back to the know-it-alls, the smug quoters of scripture. Jesus turns again to the Sadducees and in the same way he answered Satan in the desert, Jesus quotes Scripture to answer Scripture. He refers to the third chapter of Exodus, where Moses refers to the Lord as the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. This is not a history lesson. This is a pedigree. Jesus says further that God “is not God of the dead, but of the living…” What is the inference? Clearly, it is that the patriarchs are not dead. Yes, their bodies are at rest, but if God is God of the living and not the dead and if God is addressed as God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, figure it out. They may have changed state, but they are not dead! The Sadducees are silenced. The scribes, part of the Pharisaic sect, were so impressed that the Sadducees had been silenced that they actually complimented Jesus. They also quit asking questions.

Our Savior has never been without an answer for our questions. Sometimes, the answers may be out of this world, but he has all the answers we will ever need. What is heaven like? I don’t know. I just know that my Savior promised me that if I am considered worthy to attain to that resurrection, I will be equal to angels and I will be a son of God. That’s enough explanation for me.   

In the children’s praise song Heaven Is a Wonderful Place, Salty is asked if he knows anything about heaven. He says “Sure. I know that Jesus is there, and if he’s there it must be a wonderful place.” He sings a song adapted from Psalm 53:

Heaven   is   a wonderful place

Filled   with  glory and grace

All I wanna see is my Savior’s face

‘Cause heaven is a wonderful place.

“Then some of the scribes answered. “Teacher, you have spoken well.”

Let us pray.                   11/10/13