This Gospel takes a lot of explaining. First, who were the Sadducees? Our Gospel readings have taken a little hop; Jesus is suddenly in Jerusalem, during his last week, with tensions building and enemies plotting. The Sadducees seem to have been a religious group within Judaism who tended to be wealthy and influential. They were closely associated with the Great Temple in Jerusalem, which is why this meeting happens now. The Sadducees as a group didn’t last long after the destruction of the Great Temple in the year 70 CE, so we don’t know a lot about them except stuff that outsiders wrote. But notably for this little encounter, they did not believe in any kind of life after death. They’ve heard that Jesus – like the Pharisees – does teach that there’s life beyond this world, so they bring him a riddle to try to prove that the whole idea is stupid. 

I’ll come back to the riddle, but first: What’s this about Moses and a bush? There’s so much story here; go read the first few chapters of the Book of Exodus if it’s new to you! Moses was a great leader of God’s people in their early years, who led them out of slavery in Egypt. The bush story is before all that. As a young man Moses got into trouble and ran off into the desert. He got married and settled into a life of tending his father-in-law’s goats. One day he’s out with the flock and sees something burning. It’s a bush, on fire, but somehow not burning up. Then the bush calls out to him: “Moses! Moses!” Moses has been raised in the faith of his people, but this is his first direct encounter with the Living God – who speaks through the burning bush to say, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob,” and then to command Moses to go back to Egypt and tell Pharaoh, the King, to let God’s people go. 

Jesus quotes this story to the Sadducees – who deeply respected the traditions of Moses – to argue that God’s syntax hints that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, great patriarchs of God’s people long-dead in this world, are alive with God somehow. 

Okay. Third piece of background. What is with this weird question the Sadducees ask!?! Whenever levirate marriage comes around, I get to put on my anthropologist hat for a minute. Within Jewish law and tradition, levirate marriage is laid out in the 25th chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy: “If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband’s brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her. The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel.” (Sidebar: Look up Deuteronomy chapter 25, verses 7-10 later, to see what happens if the brother doesn’t want to marry the widow.) 

This practice is best known to us from the Bible – it’s a key plot point in the Book of Ruth – but it’s not unique to ancient Judaism. It makes anthropological sense in strongly patriarchal cultures in which it’s important for every man to leave a son to carry on his lineage. It also provides some protection for widowed women, who otherwise may have no property or security. This is marriage in its most functional form: as a safeguard for property and inheritance rights. Love, or even companionable cohabitation, is beside the point. Which isn’t to say that love didn’t matter – there are romance stories in the Bible! – but that the laws around marriage and inheritance were not very interested in feelings. 

The practice of levirate marriage was falling into disfavor in most Jewish communities by the 3rd century or earlier, and likely was never common – Jewish law allowed both parties to refuse. But it was indisputably part of the law of Moses. So the Sadducees bring this riddle to Jesus, with the intention of arguing that the idea of life after death is clearly ridiculous. 

Okay. Now that we more or less know what’s going on, there are a couple of things I’d like note in Jesus’ response. Because there’s interesting stuff here beyond a clever reply. 

For one thing, we get a glimpse here of Feminist Jesus. Levirate marriage was the law, but there’s evidence in Scripture itself that people did not like it. Men didn’t want to have to take on the responsibility of housing and feeding some random woman, possibly older, possibly with daughters to marry off, which was expensive. They didn’t want to take on the obligation of trying to have a son with this woman, to honor their dead brother’s memory. We don’t really have Biblical hints of how women felt about it, but I’m pretty sure it was weird and unpleasant at best, frightening and degrading at worst. 

The woman in the Sadducees’ riddle is fully hypothetical. But you can still imagine her getting more and more dismayed as she’s passed from brother to brother to brother, as each one dies. Then Jesus says, That’s not how any of this works, and the hypothetical woman says, Oh, thank God!

Jesus says, In the resurrection, people neither marry nor are given in marriage. For people for whom such things are a struggle, a burden, a constraint, this was and is good news. In whatever comes next, they can be simply their selves, whole and free, without cultural roles and expectations. Let me be clear: for us today, getting and staying married is usually a relatively free choice, and congruent with our feelings and desires. In the ancient world, marriage probably housed some degree of mutual affection much of the time, but it was also a matter of familial, social, and economic necessity to a degree that’s hard for most of us to comprehend. 

So: You may be happily married and quite like the idea of getting to hang around with your spouse in whatever life comes after this. What I hear Jesus saying is that in resurrection life, people will no longer be bound. Free to play divine shuffleboard or attend angelic choir practice with whatever fellow children of the resurrection they vibe with. 

It’s just a small step from what Jesus says here about life beyond death, to thinking about our fundamental being-ness in God’s eyes. If people aren’t married in the resurrection, presumably they’re also not enslaved, or closeted, or closed in by any of the many other things that can define and limit us. And if people are their full and free selves before God in the resurrection, that suggests that that’s how God sees us, and loves us, in the here and now. What good and gracious news for everyone who may struggle to have room to have a self, to be a person, amidst all that binds and burdens them. And of course this isn’t just Feminist Jesus but pro-human Jesus; folks who identify as men are also often bound by roles and expectations. 

The second thing I’d like to pull out from today’s Gospel has to do with life after death. The Rite I funeral liturgy in our prayer book refers to belief in the resurrection of the dead as a reasonable and holy hope, a wonderful 18th century phrase. A reasonable and holy hope… but you could just as easily say that it’s an unreasonable hope. That our loved ones have some kind of continued life after they die is something that people can very much want to believe… and can really struggle to believe, sometimes at the same time.

I suspect that that’s always been true. Sometimes we assume folks in olden days were more naive and credulous than our modern selves. But death was not more mysterious to people in Jesus’ time than it is to us. The sick and aged would die at home, among family, and bodies would be tended by loved ones. Infant mortality and death in childbirth were common. 

People knew what death looked like, felt like, smelled like, much more than most of us do. Jesus’ insistence that death was somehow not the end would not have been easier for folks to believe back then than it is for us now, with death largely handled by various discreet professionals. 

The Sadducees here are trying to make Jesus look ridiculous, but he points out the ridiculousness of their premise: that life beyond this world is just an extension of life in this world, more of the same. A few weeks back we heard Jesus’ story about the rich man and Lazarus, from Luke chapter 16. When Lazarus, the poor man, dies, he is carried by angels to the bosom of Abraham, while the rich man who ignored his need is sent to Hades to burn in torment. I said then, and I’ll say again now, that this is not Jesus telling people what happens after you die. This is Jesus telling a story to make a point. But there are places in the Gospels where it seems like Jesus is trying to say something about the life beyond this life, and this is one of them. And I get the impression that it’s kind of hard to explain. 

Notice that Jesus doesn’t use the word Heaven, here, though it’s so easy for us to read that in, complete with fluffy clouds and the aforementioned heavenly choirs. Instead he talks about the life beyond this life as an age, an aeon in the New Testament Greek; and simply as the resurrection, the English word used to translate the wonderful Greek word anastasis, meaning to rise up or come back to life. 

In the age of resurrection, we will be like angels and children of God. Like the other places where Jesus gestures towards life beyond this world, this feels frustratingly elusive. Tell me more, Jesus. Will there be shuffleboard? Will there be karaoke? How about chocolate? 

And… will the person I miss so much be there to greet me?   

The way Jesus talks about life after death raises big questions about both life and death. In next week’s Gospel we’ll hear Jesus say something a little perplexing, as he warns his followers about future persecution: “They will put some of you to death… But not a hair of your head will perish.” Wait – I’m going to be put to death, but “not a hair of my head will perish” – a hyperbole that suggests perfect safety? Here, and elsewhere, it seems that there are different kinds of death. Dying in this world – dying to this world – isn’t dying in some ultimate and final sense.

Likewise, life in this world is not the fulness of life. Theologian Arthur McGill writes,  “The ‘eternal life’ that Jesus brings… [is] not just another form of ordinary life, which is somehow freed from death and made interminable. Rather, eternal life is a new and unique order of life, an elevation and transfiguration of the ordinary, a share in the divine life.” 

As the apostle Paul writes in the first letter to the Corinthians, “Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed… For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” Our funeral liturgy expresses this mystery beautifully in the Eucharistic preface: “For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended.”

With two thousand years of theology and science at my back, I don’t feel that I can really do any better than Paul at putting words to strange and elusive hope of the resurrection of the dead.  The belief that those who have left this life and this world are living some new kind of life, in the nearer presence of God, can’t be proved or explained. It’s one of the things we try to take on faith, no more and no less than those who first heard Jesus speak. 

I often try to say a little of this when I speak at funerals – about the frustrating yet hopeful mystery of Jesus’ promise of life beyond the grave. It’s good to talk about it now, too, while our saint altar stands before us, with images of great saints of the church and with the names and photos of those we remember with love, those we ache to hold once more. 

In the age of resurrection, we will be like angels and children of God. We don’t know what that means – or even if it’s true – and we won’t know, until it’s our turn. 

But in this season of spooky skeletons and remembrance altars, 

In this season when the veil between worlds feels thin, 

In this season when deepening dark and falling leaves make us think of losses and endings, 

In this season when so many are holding their beloved dead close – or struggling with how distant they seem… 

I pray that we may feel a breath of comfort of consolation.

Of reasonable and holy hope, 

That for God’s beloved children life is indeed changed, not ended.

That there is an After, a Beyond, a More, among the saints in light. Amen. 

 

 

Arthur C. McGill (1926-1980), ‘Suffering: A Test of Theological Method’