A sermon preached at Trinity-Mount Rainier on the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost (LSB Proper 27C), November 10, 2019.
The Living God of Life
Exodus 3:1-15 and Luke 20:27-40
(Other Reading Appointed: 2 Thessalonians 2:1-8, 13-17)
Thanks to the internet and the memes created on it, a picture that has sometimes popped up on my news feed is one of a statue of Jesus with His face in his hand, perhaps because He was weeping for some reason. Usually this picture has been connected with someone having done something or said something which seems, well, incredibly stupid. This picture has often been named the “Jesus Facepalm”, and in one particular meme it states, “He forgives you…but still…”, the thinking behind it being the following question, “How could you be so stupid?”
My Geometry teacher in high school had a slogan posted across the top of the classroom blackboard which said, “The only stupid question is an unasked question”. Today’s encounter between Jesus and the Sadducees in today’s Gospel almost comes across as a moment which may have left Jesus shaking His head at the question which had been put to Him. Yet, even though this could have been a “Jesus Facepalm” moment, Jesus does take the time to answer the Sadducees’ question, not to give them the answer that they were looking for, but to reveal to them, to the others who were around to hear Jesus’ words that day, and to us more about who the God we worship, follow, and serve is.
The setting of today’s Gospel is our finding Jesus in Jerusalem, teaching in the Temple courts during the opening days of what we know as Holy Week. As He teaches those who were following Him, especially about the coming last days, we also find groups of people who come to Jesus to ask Him questions. These people are Jesus’ “opponents” who are asking these questions either to make Him look bad or even unlearned in the eyes of the people, or as part of a “fishing expedition” to find words with which to use later as they sought to bring Him to trial and ultimately put to death.
One of these groups was made up of the Sadducees that we meet in today’s Gospel. The Sadducees were a group which for the most part represented the “ruling elite” among the Jewish People. They were religious and observant, but differed from the Pharisees in that their “doctrinal positions” were only based upon what was in the written Torah of Moses. Because of this, they did not believe in doctrines such as belief in angels, spirits, or the resurrection of the dead. And it is on this last point which makes the question which they pose to Jesus so interesting. Why would they ask Jesus a question which at its heart is about the resurrection if they themselves didn’t believe in it? Again, it is perhaps that the question was asked of Jesus more to show off what the Sadducees thought they knew and how little that Jesus knew.
It is interesting that this meeting between Jesus and the Sadducees is found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s Gospels, but it is what we heard from Luke that seems to have “left out” a part of Jesus’ answer to the Sadducees. In Matthew and Mark’s account, Jesus lays into His questioners by saying, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (cf.: Mt. 22:29; Mk. 12:24). With this statement, Jesus was telling those who brought this question to Him that He understood it better than they did, and then went on to answer the question, showing those who listened what He knew, which seemed to impress some scribes who said, “Teacher, you have spoken well”, which then led to Luke’s ending comment, “For they no longer dared to ask Him any question.”
With this background, this should lead us to ask what was this question of the Sadducees all about and what does Jesus’ answer reveal about what He wanted them and us to know. The question that they brought was about what will the life of the resurrection look like. Now this is interesting in and of itself simply because it was well known that the Sadducees rejected the very idea of a resurrection because they found nothing in the Torah which supported it. So their question really mocked the belief in the resurrection, thinking that if it were true that it was just a simple continuation of one’s earthly life, and if so, was perhaps fraught with some difficulties, one of which would be the example given in their question to Jesus.
The Sadducees example was drawn from the Torah which gave command that a man who died childless should have his family line continued with offspring conceived by his widow through the dead man’s brothers. Yet in giving Jesus such an extreme example of a widow trying to have a child for her dead husband through his other six brothers, the Sadducees were mocking the very idea of the resurrection, saying in essence, “Look how stupid and crazy the resurrection is if it creates a world where a woman has to be the wife of seven men.”
But Jesus cuts through their reasoning and reveals what the resurrection world and life is really like. He realizes that the “ties that bind” us together here on earth are quite real and also quite important to us. And though we speak of looking forward to the reunion with those we love who have gone on before us in faith which eternal life will certainly be, this is not what is at the heart of the resurrection. The reason God raises the dead is so that we may be forever reunited with Him; to live out lives which, while they may reflect some aspects of the life we currently live on this earth, are made completely and totally new in God’s new heavens and earth which bring us back to that Paradise which was once lost to us by sin. So Jesus’ statement is that marriage, though important here on earth, is not a part of the life of eternity, because those who live this new life “cannot die anymore, because they are equal to the angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.”
Jesus then goes a step further to teach the Sadducees that the Scriptures which they believed and followed did in fact teach the resurrection which they mocked and refused to believe. He took them to the very words of the Torah, the passage where God revealed Himself and His Name to Moses. In this revelation, Jesus shows both the very nature of God and what God wills to give to those who live and believe in Him. The nature of God is testified to us by God’s own Divine Name: YHWH, the Eternal, I AM WHO I AM. This God is the Ever-living Living One, the One without beginning or end, the One Who Is, Who Was, and Who Is to come. This is the God who is eternally living and alive, who is Life and the Source of life, and who because of His very nature is the One who is the Lord and Giver of life.
And because of what we know about this Eternal One, we also come to discover what He wills to give to those who live and believe in Him. Just as God speaks of Himself through His Name in the present tense, He also speaks of His faithful ones in the same way. As God comes to Moses to call him to be the great liberator of His people from their slavery in Egypt, God says to Moses, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” God does not say that “I was their God”, but “I am their God”, revealing that these saints, though dead in the thinking of the world and of earthly life, are in truth eternally alive in, with, and through the God who gave to them both earthly and eternal life, thus revealing Himself as the Eternal Living God of Life and of the living.
As we go through these concluding days of the Christian Liturgical Year, the Church moves our thoughts and gaze towards the things which are yet to come which are often called “the last things”. And of all the last things, the one on which we sometimes tend to dwell on the most is that of our death and of the future which awaits each of us in eternity. This is perhaps because we know that it is death which affects each of us personally because it is something which we will all meet and must go through, unless the Lord Jesus should return first. But it is these words of our Savior which have been given to us to both instruct us and to comfort us. The instruction we receive is that we worship, follow, and serve the Eternal Living God whose will it is to give us life lived in and with Him for both here in time and forever in eternity. And our comfort is found that we know this to be true, not only because God has revealed Himself as the Eternal and that He gives His life to those who are His own, but also because we have seen this promise of life fulfilled in and through Jesus Christ the Son of God, who both died and was raised to life, becoming the harbinger of the life which awaits all the faithful believing children of God’s creating and redeeming.
“For they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.” This is the promise to us by the Living God of Life that we who live and believe in Him, though we die, will live eternally in and with Him in the joy of everlasting life. This is the hope of the child of God, confirmed as sure and certain by the One who is by His very Name the Eternal, and as He is, so shall we too be. This is our hope, our life, our peace, and our eternal joy and glory. Thanks be to Christ! Amen!
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