At any given time, most of the world believes that death isn’t final, that some form of immortality exists.
Most people believe that those who have died still exist in some state, in some place, in some heaven or hell--however that might be conceived. As Christians, here is our belief: we believe that the dead are still alive, still themselves and, very importantly, still in a living, conscious, and loving relationship with us and with each other. That’s our common concept of heaven and, however simplistic its popular expression at times, it is wonderfully correct. After death we live on, conscious, self-conscious, in communication with others who have died before us, in communion with those we left behind on earth, and in communion with the divine itself.
In this Gospel story, Jesus comes faces-to-face with the Sadducees, who are the most powerful group of national political and religious leaders in Israel.
They were the group Rome turned to when they were looking to appoint a new high priest. They were the group that provided the members of the Sanhedrin, the national ruling body. By becoming embroiled with the Sadducees instead of the Pharisees, it was as if Jesus had gone from fighting with members of city hall to fighting with the most powerful — and ruthless — leaders of Congress and the White House.
The Sadducees gained their power by working hand-in-glove with the occupying Roman government. They had a hard-earned reputation for saying or doing pretty much anything to avoid rocking the boat and losing their privileged positions.
Of course, the Sadducees had religious functions, but their primary role was political. As our own leaders demonstrate, sometimes religious beliefs make it very difficult to perform certain political maneuvers. Therefore, for what I believe to have been pragmatic political reasons, the Sadducees refused to believe in any of what we think of as the Old Testament, except the first five books.
Who needs to hear that sort of thing when you have the very real and extremely dangerous power of Rome on your doorstep? Limiting the Bible to the first five books also, in their view, precluded belief in such silly ideas as life after death. So that’s where they focused their attack on Jesus.
To truly understand the question they posed to Jesus, you need to know about “levirate marriage.” That was an ancient law which came straight out Deuteronomy 25. It required that if a man were to die before he had a son, it was the responsibility of the man’s brother to marry the widow so that she could have a son to take care of her.
Our modern reaction to this law tends to focus on the way it potentially tramples over the wishes of both the widow and her brother-in-law. But that’s not how the ancients viewed it. We may have a hard time relating to this idea, but in Jesus’ day, women were always kept under the care of a man. First it was her father, then presumably her husband and eventually her son.
That was the ancient social security system — family looking out for family. The problem was that if an adult woman had no husband and no son, she would probably be on her own and be forced into begging or prostitution, since there really weren’t any other significant occupations open to women.
Levirate marriage was intended to provide widows with a son who would be considered the offspring and heir of her late husband and who would ultimately care for the widow in her old age.
But there was another aspect to levirate marriage that most people overlook. That was the belief that the only way a person could achieve a life beyond this life was through the memories of his or her children. \
Belief in a personal life after death entered the Jewish religion, but none of that appears in the first five books of the Bible, so the Sadducees were convinced that they had Jesus backed into a corner. And they played up the situation for all the comedic value it was worth, with their ludicrous question about the tangled domestic trail created in heaven by levirate marriage. The only minor problem was that they had radically underestimated Jesus. They thought they’d placed him in a theological box until he kicked the sides out.
Henri Nouwen said “We can live as if this life were all we had, as if death were absurd and we better not talk about it, or we can choose . . . to trust that death is the painful but blessed passage that will bring us face to face with our God.”
Jesus became the resurrection. He returned in a body that people identified as his by its scars. They recognized him in his mannerisms, that particular way he had of breaking bread and of carrying on heart-stirring conversations. “He ate fish, broke bread, cooked breakfast. He also walked through locked doors and vanished while people were looking right at him. He was the same, but he was different, and because he was both, our futures may turn out to be as astounding as his.”
Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends to strengthen our belief that the Resurrection is not about our worthiness, but the power of God’s faithfulness and unspeakable love. God is God of the living, for all are alive to God.
