Twenty- Fourth Sunday After Pentecost-November 11, 2007

(Preached at Providence Lutheran Church, Holland, Ohio

by Pastor Dennis R. King)

"It’s True—Life Eternal for You!"

(Luke 20:27-38)

The grace and mercy of our Lord, Jesus Christ be with you.

Have you ever noticed that just about every legitimate and powerful group in the Jewish community oppose and challenge Jesus’ authority? Luke 20 opens with the statement that, “One day, as Jesus was teaching the people in the temple and telling the good news, the chief priests and the scribes came with the elders and said to Him, ‘Tell us, with what authority are you doing these things? Who is it who gave you this authority?’” Here we have the chief priests who represent the leaders in religious authority, sort of like our Council of Bishops, lined up against Jesus. Then there are the scribes, who are the professional lawyers, scrutinizing everything Jesus does, looking for the tiniest breach of law. The elders are mature and successful businessmen of the community, who want to get Jesus quietly out of the picture because the attention he’s getting and the band of rag-tag followers he is collecting are, frankly, not good for business. Earlier he encountered the Pharisees, who showed up to register their displeasure with him. They were the rigid legalists who fortified the Law of Moses with laws of their own and elevated tradition to the same level of importance as Law. Interestingly, the Pharisees were watching and waiting for the Messiah to come; and even though he’s right there in front of them—they miss him!

All these groups who didn’t always see eye-to-eye were allied against Jesus, because they “kept looking for a way to kill Jesus, but they couldn’t find anything they could do because all the people were spellbound by what they heard (Luke 19:44-45).”

In today’s reading, the Sadducees jump into the act. Who are the Sadducees? They are a family of priests and aristocratic laypeople who usually oppose anything the Pharisees are in favor of. The fact that the Pharisees and Sadducees are united on this one issue means that things have become very grave, indeed, for Jesus. All influential religious and community people are out to get him.

The Sadducees come with a question for Jesus. “Teacher, Moses wrote that if a man’s brother dies leaving a wife but no children, the man’s brother shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother.” This was quite true. It is called Levirite marriage, and it is still practiced in parts of the world today. According to the Law of Moses, if a married man died without having children, the brother of the deceased was obligated to marry the widow and have children by her. The first son born of this union was to be named after the deceased in order to continue his name and lineage. The reason for this law was practical – to continue the family ownership of property. Most Israelites understood “eternal life” to mean producing male heirs who would continue the family line. The deceased would live on in the memory of their heirs. What they did not believe in was the resurrection of the dead, life with God eternally in Heaven.

The hypothetical case the Sadducees propose is one in which a man’s widow ends up consecutively marrying and out-living all six of his brothers and still being childless. “In the resurrection, then,” they ask, “Whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her!” This is an interesting question, particularly in view of the fact that the Sadducees didn’t even believe in a resurrection. Why do they ask it, then? They want to trap Jesus.

The Sadducees only believed in the first five books of the Bible. Therefore they believed the primary purpose of marriage was to produce children. The levirate marriage provided for the birth of children where otherwise there would be none. From the perspective of the Sadducees, the only way to live eternally is for your DNA to survive in your offspring, although they wouldn’t have said it quite in that way. But Jesus says, it is not like that at all. There are stark differences between “this age” and “the age to come.” The Sadducees assumed that if there were such a thing as the resurrection, it would be a continuation of life as we know it… forever.

Jesus answers that “those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage.” However, that is not so in the resurrection. “They are like angels,” Jesus says. What does it mean to be like angels? What we know about angels from scripture is that their primary concern is to do God’s bidding. And their most intimate and important relationship is with God. In the new age to come there is no reason for marriage and for bearing children because persons will not die. Resurrection is life eternal. There one shall be gathered together with Christ and those loved ones who have gone before them (us). In the resurrection age all those who are gathered to Christ are considered children themselves – innocent and trusting, filled with joy and wonder. In the resurrection “they cannot die anymore.” To be dead means to be cut off, isolated, from all living things, and especially to be separated from God. Children of God, like the angels, cannot ever be separated from God, not even through the ending of their physical life in “this age.” As St. Paul testifies to the Romans, “I am convinced that nothing neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Then Jesus in our text reminds the Sadducees of their own hero, Moses, to prove that there is life after death. When God from the burning bush declared: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” (Ex 3:6); he was speaking of people all of whom were dead! If the dead no longer exist, as the Sadducees believed and if they have become nothing then God would be declaring, “I am the God of nothing.” So, if God is to be the God of something, those people must be alive to God, (even though they are dead to us). So, there must be a resurrection of the dead. The actual voice of God has declared it in the Sadducees’ own scripture! And if “all of them are alive,” Jesus argues, there is your proof of resurrection.

The God who created human life, including the institution of marriage, has also provided for life after death for those who believe and respond to God’s love. The Bible teaches that life comes from God. There is nothing in a human being that is naturally immortal. Life beyond death is God’s gift to those who believe in Jesus and accept His love and enter into relationship with Him in this life.

We want to be clear, Jesus isn’t denying the reality of death -- but he is saying that God can raise us up from death to life. We all know that death is real, but Jesus’ word is that God will raise us from death to live in His presence eternally. That existence will be a whole new life for us. It isn’t more of the same, like life here and now, but a new life beyond what we can imagine.

Our trying to understand the resurrection is like trying to explain chemistry to a toddler. They’re not ready for that yet. Try to sit a two-year-old down and explain to him that water is really two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. When these two are brought together they form water. Sure, hydrogen is a gas and oxygen is, of course, a gas, but together they form a liquid -- water -- the ordinary drink we have everyday.

Now if you could get a toddler to sit still long enough to say this, and if he heard the words you spoke, he would give you a strange look like, "Where are you from, Mars?"

Chemistry is reality. It tells us the absolute truth about how our world is made. Everything we see and touch and taste and breathe is made up of these chemical elements. But a child of that age doesn’t have the maturity or the mental acuity to comprehend what we are talking about.

I think that is similar to what Jesus is saying here. The age of resurrection is not something that we are able to comprehend yet. It is so different from our life here, and so much better, that we can’t even imagine what it will be like. It is reality. It is as true as anything in this world, but we don’t yet have the ability to fathom what it is like.

Our perspective is limited by this world. We have trouble picturing anything as good and as different as resurrection life. Some of us have trouble coloring outside the lines, let alone picturing a whole new existence.

The new life that God has prepared for us beyond the grave is beyond what we can imagine. But one day ... we will experience it to the fullest as we continue to live eternally in God’s Kingdom. Amen.