Reflection on Luke 20:27-38

Luke 20:27-38 (NRSVue)

27 Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to [Jesus] 28 and asked him a question: “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman and died childless; 30 then the second 31 and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. 32 Finally the woman also died. 33 In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”

  34 Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, 35 but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. 36 Indeed, they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. 37 And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. 38 Now he is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.”

 

Reflection

“To [God], all of them are alive” (Luke 20:38).  That is what Jesus says about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  In the eyes of God these faithful ancestors of long ago are all alive. 

I had a Baptist friend who was blown away by that singular verse of scripture.  He had always thought that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob could not have possibly come to know Jesus Christ and come to believe in him as their personal Lord and Savior.  All three had died long before Jesus.  He was previously convinced that they were lost, gone, never to find hope in the resurrection.  But, right here in the Bible is where Jesus blew his mind and revealed that, in God, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are alive, a part of eternal life.  “I guess it really is only God who decides these things.  It is not up to us at all.  Not even the size of our faith decides it.  Only God does,” he commented excitedly as if he had stumbled upon the largest revelation of his life.

Before this, he wondered about the eternal fate of those who had lived before Jesus’ birth.  It was a question about death that had loomed in the back of his mind.  But he is not the only one to have questions about death and what happens after. 

“What about my pets?  Will I get to see them in heaven?” was the hot debate one afternoon in the scene shop of my college theatre department.  Guys were busy nailing, painting, and constructing, and it hardly seemed like the appropriate space for a theological debate, and yet there we were, debating the afterlife of fluffy little pets.  Well, mostly fluffy anyway.  I had a hermit crab for a pet.  Do they go to heaven?

A woman once asked a much more deeply personal question: “Will my husband be mad that I married someone else after he died?  And will I be forced to choose between them in the afterlife?  Or will it just be an eternity of anxiety as I live between these two people that I have loved with my whole heart?”  As I said, lots of people have questions about the afterlife.  Death always seems to linger close by.

“Will my child be forever eight years old?  Will God never give her the chance to know the excitement of finding who she is and finding the love of her life?” the mother of a child who had recently been overcome by cancer asked.  The questions come, stabbing at our hearts and death lingers.

I wish that I had clear answers to all these questions concerning death.  I am not certain that I have any.  But what I do have to say is that all these questions are honest.  They are all heartfelt.  They all touch on love and loss and uncertainty and hope in a very real and raw way.

This was not the case with the Sadducees.  They were members of the wealthy, religious families who oversaw the temple.  They came up to Jesus and asked a question of their own.  But their question was not honest.  It was not heartfelt and tender.  It was an absurd question about a woman who ended up having seven husbands as she was handed from brother to brother upon each brother’s death.  The Sadducees want to know who owns the woman in the resurrection.  “In the resurrection…whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her” (Luke 20:33).

If read in the Greek, the phrase about whose wife she will be stinks strongly of “who will possess her,” and I find that horrid.  They wanted to know who owned her.  I find the idea of owning anyone repulsive.  Further, they did not actually care about Jesus’ answer.  They just wanted him to fall into the trap of talking about an absurd situation and answering in an absurd way, all to prove that they were right in thinking that “there is no resurrection” (Luke 20:27).  They wanted to show that Jesus was wrong in claiming that there is a resurrection.  Their question was not heartfelt or honest.

Now, I do not know how much Jesus understood at the time about us and our concerns about death over two thousand years into the future, but Jesus’ answer is heartfelt and honest, as if he knew that there would be times in our lives when we would desperately need his answer.

As if Jesus somehow knows that we are listening in on his answer about the resurrected life, Jesus answers honestly to the Sadducees’ dishonest question.  Jesus answers that it is “Those who belong to this age” who “marry and are given in marriage” (Luke 20:34).  In other words, these questions and problems are what we worry about in this age and this life.  

And we do worry.  We worry about hurting other’s feelings when we love someone new, and we project that fear into the resurrected life.  We worry about children and all they do or do not get to experience, and we project that fear into the resurrected life.  We worry if we will get to see and be with certain loved ones again, and we project that fear into the resurrected life.  But the resurrected life will be completely different from anything we have experienced in this age Jesus says. 

The resurrected life does not follow the same rules as this life.  It is a life we cannot even imagine.  It is a life that we have never experienced. 

We have not experienced a time without the fear of death.  We have not experienced life in the continuous presence of God without sin and fear creeping nearby.  We have not experienced a life where people cannot die.  We have not experienced a life where people have no need to marry to draw close to someone else.  In the resurrected life we will all be drawn together in the Lord, and we just cannot imagine not needing to worry about any of these questions.

It is like how today’s children will never know what it is like to have to rush home to see an episode of your favorite television show because it is only going to air once, and if you miss it, you miss it.  They do not know the anxiety of watching the time tick closer and closer to the start of the show as the pastor drones on and on at the evening council meeting.

With the advent of on-demand entertainment, this world from the past is a world that children these days simply cannot imagine.  They do not know the feelings and fears associated with that world.  They do not know the frustrations.  They know nothing about those times gone by.

Nor, at the time, could we have ever imagined that life could exist without those television anxieties and worries.  I had no idea that a time was coming when I could just search for the final episode of the comedy Three’s Company; an episode that I did not get to see since it aired when we were on the road. 

Speaking of being on the road, we also never imagined that a time would come when you would not have to worry about how you were going to get gas when traveling far from the interstates because it was Sunday and all the gas stations were closed.

Just as we could not imagine the times we are living in now, so too we just cannot imagine the resurrected life, where the anxieties and fears and questions of this world just do not make sense any longer.  We cannot imagine it, but we can hope for it. 

We can hope for the days of new life when we will not need to worry about our children and spouses who have left us way too early.  We can hope for the days when we will not fear death or worry about its implications because, as Jesus says, we “cannot die anymore” (Luke 20:36a).  We hope for the days when we “are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:36b).  We hope for the days when death is not the period at the end of the sentence, when death is not the period at the end of our lives, but death is rather a coma that simply leads us to the new part of the sentence, to the new part of our lives.  We hope for the days when we can simply bask in the knowledge that to be with God is to be alive. 

To be with God is to be alive.  God is life.  God is love.  God is eternal.  God is everlasting.  God simply is.  Death cannot lay claim to God.  We saw that as God in the flesh, Jesus Christ, burst from the tomb as if death had no say on his life.  That same Jesus Christ pulls us up with him out of the pit of death as a father who does not want to leave his children behind.  In the death and resurrection of Jesus, God has made you children of God forever.  You are children of the resurrection, and you will not be left behind in the grave.

“Children.”  The Bible says that resurrected ones “are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:36b).  Jesus says we are children. 

I do not think that he meant it to be demeaning.  The great thing about children is that they simply trust.  When they are lost, they hold the hand of a parent and just trust that the parent knows the way.  When they do not understand what is going on in life, they just trust that a parent does understand and will know how to make things right.  Children are little sponges that suck up new teachings, and they trust that you have something to teach. 

Children simply trust, and that is what makes them so great in God’s eyes.  And in the resurrected life we will be children.  I do not know if we will look like children, but I do know that we will trust like children.  We will trust God without the doubts, questions, and control issues that we have in this life.  We will simply listen to Jesus’ voice; and when he says, “Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs” we will run to him and welcome the mysterious, yet wonderful existence that is the resurrected life (Luke 18:16).

May you know the power of that trust even in this life and this age.