Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

That’s a strange story, isn’t it?

It’s almost like a theological question without a good answer,

like the famous, "If God can do anything,

can he make a rock so big that he can’t move it?"

Something that proves the cleverness of the questioner

more than it demonstrates anything about the question-ee.

And yet, Jesus decides to engage the questioners, the Sadducees.

He may not take their question very seriously,

but he does take them seriously.

They are wrong about the question of resurrection, Jesus believes,

and so he chooses to try to teach them,

even though he won’t let them define the terms of the lesson.

Most of us, though, get stuck at a different place

than did the Sadducees.

Given their culture’s beliefs about marriage,

they want to know,

to which man will a woman belong in the resurrection,

if there is any such thing.

Hoping, of course, to demonstrate that resurrection is a silly notion,

since their question is problematic no matter how you answer it.

Will she belong to the first brother, since that was the first one she married?

Or to the seventh one, since she didn’t marry anyone after that?

Or would God let her choose whichever one was nicest to her?

See how silly that is, Jesus?

Therefore, resurrection is silly.

Where we are more likely to get stuck is at Jesus’ declaration

that those who are among the resurrected

"neither marry nor are given in marriage."

In our culture, it makes some sense for us to worry about that.

Our whole notion of marriage is based on romantic love;

we "fall for" someone and choose to commit our life and our future to that person,

on the basis of those feelings of attachment.

And so it seems cruel to us to suggest that, somehow,

in the life that is to come,

we no longer get to be in partnership with that person in the same way.

We forget how recent in the history of humankind

is our way of looking at and entering into marriage.

Put yourself in this repeat-widow’s place for a moment,

if you can:

You are married for the first time,

to a man that your parents probably chose for you.

It’s likely that he is several years older than you are,

perhaps even a friend of the family

who is closer to your parents’ age than yours.

But he is successful, and he owns land,

so that your children will be provided for,

and your sons will have a good share to inherit.

Perhaps over time you come to have some affection for this husband,

if he treats you well,

but you certainly didn’t marry him because you had fallen in love with him!

But a terrible thing happens:

Out plowing the field one day,

there’s an accident with the oxen, and your husband is killed.

And you don’t yet have any children to inherit his property.

According to the Jewish law,

it is the obligation of his brother to marry you –

along with any other wife the brother already has –

in order that you can give birth to children

who will be thought of legally as your first husband’s children,

so that they can inherit the land.

Why is that such a big deal?

Because as a woman, in that society,

you need sons who will be responsible for

caring for you and supporting you in your old age.

You can’t inherit your husband’s property.

Only a son can, or, rarely, a daughter.

If you have no children, you are helpless.

So even though the mechanism of it seems strange to us, in our day,

the law ensures that a childless widow

will not be condemned to a life of poverty or worse.

Her husband’s family must provide for her,

including the responsibility of his brothers

to beget children that will bear his name.

And the reason that a law had to get made for this

is that without it, landowning males

might quickly see the chance to increase their holdings over time

by insuring that their brothers died childless,

thus giving them a greater portion of the inheritance.

So the law had to require that a man’s brothers do this,

since it wasn’t in their personal best interest to do so.

Only the community’s best interest.

Okay, anyway … Husband # 1 dies.

You marry his brother, according to what the law requires.

But before that marriage can produce any children, he dies.

Repeat the procedure with brother #3.

And brother #4.

And brothers 5, 6, and 7 …

all of whom die before fathering a son

on behalf of dearly-departed brother #1.

Now, if this were a real-life story,

with all these brothers dropping dead one after another,

we’d probably have ourselves a really good murder mystery

of the "black widow" genre.

How did she poison their pottage?

But since it’s only a hypothetical silliness,

posed by a bunch of Sadducees,

we can leave that behind and simply think about their question:

to whom will she belong in the resurrection?

It’s not as if she chose any of them to be her husband.

We cannot assume that she was particularly in love with any of them,

or that she spent any more time with them

than she absolutely had to.

Nevertheless, Jesus is posed the question:

whose will she be?

If I were a Sadducee today, posing this sort of trick question,

I’d probably set it up a little differently.

I might say, You know, Jesus,

when I was a child, I had to do everything my father told me.

Didn’t matter what I thought or what I wanted;

my task was always to obey.

Even though we’re both adults now,

I still am supposed to carry out his wishes.

Well, I have a son, who is supposed to obey me;

and some day, he will have a son

who is expected to obey him,

and so on, and so on …

And so my question is this, Jesus:

In the resurrection, who’s going to give orders to whom?

Will the older and earlier generations always have more authority,

and the youngest always have to do their bidding?

And Jesus might will respond with something like,

"In that time there are neither parents nor children,

but God is the father and mother to us all."

Does that mean that we no longer have a relationship

with those who were our earthly parents?

Of course not.

It does mean that those relationships are transformed in the presence of God,

and become something other than what they were.

Likewise, Jesus suggests,

in the resurrection "they neither marry nor are given in marriage."

Does that mean we won’t get to spend eternity

with the persons we have loved the most?

I don’t think so, although it probably does mean

that we will also have to become accustomed to spending eternity

with a few folks we really didn’t think would be there!

Does it mean that we will no longer have greater affection

for some people than for others?

Probably not, though it may mean

that we still have more to learn about love

than we learned in this life.

Does it mean that our resurrected bodies

will no longer experience any kind of sexual desire?

I hope not!

But it may mean that those desires are channeled differently,

or expressed differently,

than they are in these unresurrected bodies we currently inhabit.

It also does seem to mean that the institution of marriage,

as different human societies have practiced it over time,

is not going to be there,

or at least, will not be recognizable to us as "marriage."

The bigger issue here –

in addition to the question about resurrection, of course –

is the way in which Jesus constantly insists

that we must stretch our ideas about who and what God is,

and what God can and will do.

We are forever trying to limit God to

what our reason can account for,

or at least, what our imaginations can imagine.

Time and again, God surprises us,

as Jesus did on so many occasions

when he was walking among us, teaching and healing.

And of course, depending on our own agenda or preconceived ideas,

those surprises may come as good news

or as not so good news.

For a moment, put yourself in the Sadducees place

rather than the widow’s place.

Not only has Jesus just demolished your trick question –

in a way that sounds convoluted to twenty-first century listeners,

but would have made perfect sense to you as a first-century Sadducee –

not only has he just blown away your

attempt to "prove" via a thought experiment that there is no resurrection…

He’s also just told you that when that resurrection comes,

you’re not going to have your wife around to wait on you any more!

Oh sure, she may well be there,

but she isn’t going to "belong to" you.

She will be her own resurrected self,

not "given" to you in marriage.

Now, if you’re a woman overhearing this conversation,

this may sound like good news indeed.

If you’re a Sadducee, it probably doesn’t sound so good.

The future that God has planned for us

is far more than we can imagine,

and different than we can imagine.

And throughout the gospels, but particularly Luke,

Jesus reminds us that that future

is likely to sound like and feel like

good news to those who have been powerless,

and not quite so good news

to those who have been powerful.

Better news to the poor than to the rich.

Good news to the weak,

not so good to the strong …

especially if they have grown strong at the expense of others.

Good news to those imprisoned,

not such good news to those who put them there.

Good news to the refugees,

not-very-good news to the ones they are fleeing from.

For Jesus to say to a group of first-century men

that in the resurrection, we "neither marry nor are given in marriage,"

is not a statement about human love and commitment.

It is a statement about inequality, and unbalanced power,

and the fact that sometimes, we have arranged human society

in ways that treat certain humans as being less than

The kingdom of God will not be like that.

Let us pray that, unlike the Sadducees,

it won’t take us seven weddings and a funeral before we can hear the message.

Let us pray that we can see into God’s imagination,

and know that a future waits for us

that is far different, but far better,

than even the best we have lived here.

Let us pray that God’s kingdom will come …

perhaps even on earth as it is in heaven.

Amen.

© 2007 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)