How many of you remember Monty Python? The British comedy group in - I think - the 70's which used to transition between their skits with “And now for something completely different....” And it always was pretty strange. Part of their appeal was that their humor was so totally off the wall, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to the Ministry of Silly Walks. But the fact of the matter is that most of us don’t really like to be taken by surprise. We don't want "something completely different." Sure, a lot of us would like changes to be made - but nice safe changes, life as we know it but better; perhaps we long for something we’ve read about or seen on TV or maybe we dream of going back to “the way things used to be.” And how could it be any other way? We only know what we know.
But sometimes we put too much effort into making sure we can’t be surprised. Sometimes we spend so much energy trying to control the future that we miss out on what God is doing. It’s like that today, and it was like that 2000 years ago. And every single one of our readings today have to do with expectation, and disappointment. Haggai’s people looked at the shabby little temple they’d managed to scrape together after they’d returned from exile in Babylon. They were disappointed in what they had accomplished. Paul’s readers in Thessalonica wanted - and expected - Jesus to come back right away, right now, so they wouldn’t have to cope with the hard work of being a church during times of persecution. They were disappointed. And in our lesson from Luke the Sadducees expected to be able to trap Jesus in a paradox and discredit both him and the Pharisees at the same time - and guess what? Jesus disappointed them.
Let me set the scene for you.
Jewish society in Jesus’ day was pretty much divided into two parties, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. There were some fringe groups, like the Zealots, who were trying to get rid of the Romans by - er - direct political action, and the Essenes, who coped by withdrawing completely into their own little enclaves. But, basically, anyone who had any time left over after trying to scrape out a living to think about such things was in one of the two main groups. And both groups were into control big time.
You could probably call the Sadducees the conservatives. They were doing okay with the status quo. They tended to be from the priestly class, were usually well-to-do, and believed in maintaining good relations with the Romans. The Pharisees were the progressives. Sort of. At least they were more interested in change than the Sadducees. They believed in upward mobility through education. The Sadducees had the edge in terms of political, economic and religious power, but the Pharisees were gaining ground in the religious arena, making religious status and authority something you could earn by studying Scripture and obeying the law, rather than something you had to be born with. Jesus threatened them because he seemed to hold the law lightly. That didn’t bother the Sadducees at all, except insofar as he didn’t seem to respect their authority much either. But the Sadducees were actually much more threatened by the Pharisees than they were by Jesus.
The source of the Sadducees’ power was Levitical and Aaronic descent, and the temple ritual established by Moses in Exodus and Leviticus. The first five books of the Torah were the only ones they believed in. The Pharisees, on the other hand, paid strict attention to all of the writings, including the prophets and the Psalms and the histories, and then added the oral traditions and some newfangled ideas about angels and resurrection which had become popular during the four hundred years since the last prophet, Malachi.
So here we are in Jerusalem, with the Sadducees and the Pharisees at odds with one another, and the Sadducees taking the opportunity to catch Jesus in a paradox which will also embarrass the Pharisees. They challenge the belief in resurrection by asking which, if any, of a woman’s seven earthly husbands would be her husband after the resurrection. Since the Mosaic Law forbade polyandry, that is the practice of having more than one husband at a time, something had to give, either resurrection or morality. Well, obviously a resurrected life can’t tolerate any immorality, so all seven could not be her husbands. Therefore, they reasoned, there’s no such thing as resurrection.
The Sadducees had based their question on the Pharisees’ assumption that life in the age to come would be just like life in this age, only better. In other words, they were interpreting heaven from the viewpoint of earth. Jesus, on the other hand, was teaching that we must interpret earth from the viewpoint of heaven. They had their perspective backwards.
Jesus punctures their assumption with an implied one-word answer, “none,” backs it up with logic, and concludes with a pithy quotation from Exodus, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” [Ex 3:6]
This dilemma that the Sadducees laid out stems from what was called “Levirate marriage.” It was a way of safeguarding both the name and the property of the clan. If a man’s brother died childless, it was his duty to marry the widow and give her a child so that the brother’s name and property would continue. Although the practice had died out by New Testament times, marriage and procreation were still absolutely essential not only to carry on one’s own family name and inheritance, but quite simply for the preservation of the human race. Jesus speaks to that necessity. “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage.” [v.34] But the age to come will be different.
For one thing, people will not die. “Indeed, they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.” [v.36] A better translation would probably be “equal to angels,” because we will have bodies [1 Cor 15], unlike angels who are disembodied spirits; but we won’t die, and we will have direct, unmediated access to our Creator and Lord. Think about the implications.
Even though our culture spends an inordinate amount of time and effort hiding from the reality of death, we spend our lives in its shadow. Everything we occupy ourselves with, the pursuit of food, clothing and shelter, even careers and children, are all to some extent defenses against death. They are necessary, even good. But the threat of loss and change surrounds us and stirs us to action. We cannot even imagine what it must be like to live without any of the pressures that move us through our days.
The life to come will have to be something completely different, not a mere continuation of this life in imaginary, ideal terms. Personal relationships will transcend to a new level, making procreation unnecessary. Jesus is not saying earthly husbands and wives will not know each other or continue to love each other or be close, only that “marriage” will not be part of the new world order.
Now Jesus isn’t saying that marriage is bad; what he’s saying is that it will be unnecessary. The time and place for procreation is earth, not heaven. Heaven will be a “time” - really an eternity - for re-creation, not pro-creation. As wonderful a privilege as begetting and raising children is, it is still work, hard work at times, full of challenge and misunderstanding and frustration. In heaven there will be no work as we understand it in this life. There will be creative endeavor, certainly, but not drudgery. We will ALL be children, children of God, freed of the burden of worrying, worries about our children, about our future and theirs, free of worrying about the ups and downs of the stock market, or what other people think of us, unburdened by such duties as mowing the lawn or getting dinner on the table. Think of the freedom of the two-year-old stacking blocks on one another. Does she worry about what other people think about her performance? Does he check his watch to see if he’s meeting a deadline? That gift of total absorption in the present that children know will be ours again. We will be free to live each day without shadow in the full light of the presence of God.
Love will continue, of course. But the greatest love humans can know on this earth is the love of parent for child or between man and wife. If there’s not going to be marriage or children, what will that love be like? What about sex?
C. S. Lewis said that “Our present outlook might be like that of a small boy who, on being told that sexual activity was the highest bodily pleasure should immediately ask whether you ate chocolate at the same time. On receiving the answer, ‘No,’ he might regard absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality. In vain you would tell him that the reason why lovers in their carnal raptures don’t bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate; he does not know the positive thing that excludes it.”
At its best, sex brings the body into harmony with the heart and expresses in a tangible way an otherwise invisible love. It creates a kind of unity which, for a time, erases the painful reality of our essential separateness. At these times sex reflects both God’s creativity and God’s love. Yet for all its wonder and goodness, sex has its limits. At the same time as the ecstasy of sexual behavior reveals the depths of love, it also reveals that we can only know another person in a limited way while still on earth. When the pleasure of sex subsides there is an afterglow, true, one that broadens into an enlarging love. Yet there is sadness also, for the intensity of love is fleeting. The day’s cares intrude, as the poet John Donne complained: “Busy old fool, unruly Sun, why dost thou thus through windows and through curtains call on us?” One cannot sustain the peaks of sexual - or even romantic - love for very long.
Whatever sexual love we have experienced in this life, it will be transcended in heaven to something as different from earthly sex as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is from Chopsticks. It will not be limited in intensity, or time, or the presence of a particular individual. We already know that our sexuality permeates every aspect of our being, whether we are in an active relationship or not. That power or energy can be channeled into love of all kinds and levels. Insofar as sex expresses love, it will continue into eternity, but on a different level, in a different dimension. Even though we will have bodies of some sort in heaven and can probably be expected to be sexual in some way, it will be different.
What does all of this have to do with us, here, now?
Well, although the Sadducees may be dead and gone, their philosophical grandchildren are alive and well in America, even in the church. The Sadducees were your basic materialists. The spiritual dimension of life was confined to God Himself. Swinburne’s famous line, “That no life lives forever, that dead men rise up never,” could have been written by a Sadducee. It was all very simple for the Sadducee: there was nothing beyond their earthly existence. They didn’t believe in the resurrection, the continuation of the soul or even retribution in a future existence. Their philosophical touchstone was “God helps those who help themselves.” (By the way, that’s not in the Bible.) They didn’t believe that God ever intervened in people’s lives; they rejected divine providence and argued that everything in life is up to man. While they weren’t big on social justice issues, they would certainly be more in tune with those Christians who think that social justice is the whole point of the gospel, and that salvation - if it is important at all - is a by-product of works. And, like the Sadducees, we often reduce the Bible to those passages that support our way of thinking.
And that leads us into the same kinds of mistakes the Sadducees made. They were ignorant of God’s word, and they underestimated his power. They couldn’t imagine anything better than their current condition, couldn’t see anything down the road worth sacrificing some short-term gains for, and so missed God’s presence among them in the present, and lost the promise of God’s presence in eternity.
Or, we can make the Pharisees’ mistake, making salvation contingent on codifying every conceivable connection between God and man, and so missing the marvelous, breathtaking surprises which God builds into his work of redemption.
When God intervenes to bring life out of death, we have to let him do it his way. Remember that he is “able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.” [Eph 3:20] If we remember what God has planned for us in eternity, we will be more able to be ready for what he is doing in the present. But if we insist that he stick with the little our own limited imaginations can come up with, we will be stuck forever in the shallows and the backwaters of God’s providence.
