Neill Morgan
Sermon Delivered November 11, 2007
27Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him 28and asked him a question, “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. 29Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; 30then the second 31and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. 32Finally the woman also died. 33In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.” 34Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; 35but 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. 36Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. 37And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. 38Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”
Tender Mercies
Jesus stepped into a world of conflict. When he began his ministry, the conflict between Sadducees and Pharisees was reaching full bloom. The conservative Sadducees’ bumper sticker on his old Buick read “walk slow, vote no, and keep the status quo.” The Pharisee’s bumper sticker on his little hybrid read, “Question Authority: Don’t ask why, just do it!”
Biblical scholar Sarah Dylan Breuer explains, “The Pharisees believed that God revealed God's will not just in the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), but continued to speak to and through God's people in their changing circumstances. Their theological innovations included adding new books, like Isaiah and Daniel, to the list of what was considered authoritative. They also came up with new teachings. They looked at what was happening around them in the culture -- the righteous suffered, and the wicked seemed to prosper -- and they knew that a just God wouldn't let this be the final word. They concluded that God would raise the dead. The righteous would receive their reward, and perhaps the wicked would be raised to receive punishment.
I don’t care when or where you say that, whether 2000 years ago in Jerusalem, or here and now, that is a jarring statement. And for those of us who are happily married, it’s not immediately clear where the good news is in this part of the Gospel.
So, let’s look first at the situation of this poor hypothetical woman of whom the Sadducees speak. You may have heard of the levirate marriage law. Deuteronomy 25 required that a widow marry the brother of her late husband so that they can raise up children for the brother who has died.
In the Sadducees’ example, each of the brothers dies in succession without fathering children with the woman. Therefore, they ask, cleverly pushing marriage as a wedge issue, “Whose wife is she in the resurrection?” Of course, the Sadducees aren’t asking about marriage; not really. Their agenda is to debunk the whole idea of resurrection.
But, Jesus goes after their assumptions about marriage. What they were asking, when they said, “In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?” was actually, “Whose property will she be?”
In first century Jerusalem, that’s what marriage was about, the buying and selling of young women. Their value to men was both sexual gratification and as a vehicle to produce children, preferably sons.
So, when Jesus says that in the resurrection those considered worthy neither marry nor are given in marriage, we might better translate him as saying that in the resurrection, women will be neither bought nor sold. In the resurrection, people will be defined not as the wife or husband of so-and-so; that is, the property or the owner of so-and-so, but rather as the children of God.
When I lived in Colorado, I led a funeral for a man, Mr. B., whom I did not know very well. He and his wife had been married to and divorced from each other three times, and were divorced at the time of his death. Neither of them had ever married anyone else.
In my conversation with the family, I learned that he had been a violent man. He had beaten both his children and his wife, and in the incident that his (now adult) children and his wife came back to again and again, he had pushed his wife down a flight of steps, permanently injuring her. By the time I met her, Mrs. B. walked with a cane, wincing with each step.
Why did she keep going back to him? It’s the same old story – the need for security, the hope for a better future, the religious guilt induced by the stigma of divorce. No, most of us cannot understand it, but for Mrs. B., it all made sense at the time.
We had a funeral service for Mr. B in the church sanctuary. There was hardly anyone there – his ex-wife and his grown children, a couple of faithful funeral-goers from the congregation who had remembered him as a fun and gregarious younger man fifty years ago, two funeral directors, and me.
After the funeral liturgy, Mrs. B. walked up to the casket and pointed her cane and her hard gaze at one of the funeral directors. “Open it,” she said.
“But, Mrs. B.,” the funeral director said, “in this church, we don’t open . . .”
“Open it,” she said, and turned and looked at me with an expression that dared me to contradict her order.
It was one of those moments when the phrase in the Book of Order came to mind, “exceptions to the rules for pastoral reasons.”
The funeral directors opened the casket, and Mrs. B. looked in and nodded. “Just had to be sure it was really him,” she said, and then pointed her cane at the body and said, through her tears, “You will never hurt me again.”
As she limped away, supported by one of her sons, and I could see that Mr. B. had hurt her enough to stay with her for the rest of her mortal life.
For Mrs. B., it is easy to see that this passage is good news. In the resurrection, she will walk without a limp and without pain. She will walk, proudly and courageously, free of the fears that kept her coming back to this abusive relationship. She will not be bought or sold by a man, or by her culture, or by the religious upbringing that gave her more guilt than grace. In the resurrection, finally, she will be a free woman.
So, for Mrs. B., and those who have suffered similar relationships, Jesus has good news when he says that in the resurrection, we will neither marry nor be given in marriage.
But, what about the rest of us? What about those of us who have found an eternal quality to our marriage bonds? Are we to be lonely and loveless in the life to come?
When we read Scripture through Scripture, we find that God can be trusted when it comes to love.
“Love never ends,” the apostle Paul writes, “as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. . . . 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.”
While it is clear that Jesus rejects the idea of human beings being bought and sold, it is also clear that the biblical notion of love is eternal. We have seen it, we have known it. In the deep commitment of a young couple who are crazy about each other, we recall the words of Isaiah,
“as the
bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall your God rejoice over you.”
Recently, I was about to enter a hospital room for a visit, but I stopped before knocking on the open door. I didn’t want to intrude on a private and meaningful moment. The woman who was about to go into surgery lay in the bed and her husband leaned over her and stroked a stray strand of hair from her face, and kissed her tenderly on the forehead, then whispered something into her ear that made her laugh.
In that moment of tender assurance, I thought of that verse in Ephesians, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”
So, what do we do with this? When Jesus speaks of resurrection, he does not speak of it as the Pharisees did, as only a hope for a future in which the wrongs of this world are finally overturned. He does affirm that, but he has something more to say.
Jesus lays out a challenge for us to begin living now, in this life, as we will live in the resurrection: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
For a single person, male or female, Jesus says in this passage that you don’t have to marry to have value in the eyes of God. You are a child of God with gifts and a mission and ministry, with a portion of God’s work in front of you, and you don’t have to become a husband or wife in order to live faithfully as a child of God. Whether or not marriage is in your future, it will not define your status in God’s eyes.
For those who live in the unhealthy bonds of guilt or fear or insecurity, of emotional or physical pain, Jesus says it is time, right now in this life, to change the nature of that relationship. It is time to say “No” to any behavior that reduces one to property, to an object of another’s will, to anything less than a child of God. Whatever it takes, however many friends it takes to help make this change in a relationship, it’s time to do it now, in this life. Jesus stands with those who reject objectification or abuse.
For those who live in the bonds of mutual love in a joyful marriage, Jesus challenges us to see our relationship as a gift, not just to us, but to the community around us. It is not just a private gift to be enjoyed and treasured in secret, or with a sense of superiority. It is God’s gift intended to reflect to the world Christ’s love for the church for whom he gave his very life.
The things we say to one another, the tender gestures we offer in front of others matter. The love between husband and wife in a faithful Christian marriage fills up each others hearts, and spills out all around so that the world can see a reflection of Christ’s love for the church.
Christ’s love is a love that will not let us go. In the joyful bonds of human love, when we experience a glimpse of the eternal, we can trust that God is giving us but a foretaste of the kingdom. It is a gift of the God who is the God not of the dead, but of the living.
Thanks be to God. Amen.