The Resurrection

Luke 20:27-38

This is part of a section in Luke’s Gospel where the religious elites are trying to trip up Jesus, catch him in his words. Jesus’ triumph over their scheming is meant to show him to be a true prophet, one who knows the truth.

And now it is the Sadducees who are out to fool him. The Sadducees are not as familiar to us as the Pharisees. They don’t show up as many times in the Gospels, and so we just don’t know as much about them or think about them as often as the Pharisees. Who were they?

The Sadducees came from the wealthy elites of Jerusalem. They had been influenced the most by the Greek culture that saturated the ancient Near East for centuries, and so their beliefs differed the most from the average Jewish person, and certainly the most from the Pharisees. They did not believe in the extensive traditions of the Pharisees. They only put faith in the written word, and even then, they only held onto the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. Since the Greek culture that influenced them did not believe in resurrection, and since they couldn’t find it in the Torah, they did not believe in a future resurrection. They didn’t believe in any afterlife at all. This put them at odds with the Pharisees, but they still didn’t care for Jesus. They didn’t believe in a Messiah figure, and frankly, they didn’t want one. Messiahs always led to trouble, and they were too wealthy and powerful to want trouble!

They ask Jesus a hypothetical question about levirate marriage. This practice comes from Deuteronomy 25, and basically if a married man died without children and he had a brother, then the brother was responsible to marry the widow. And the first son of that marriage was legally the son of the dead brother. There were two ideas behind this practice: One was to give protection to women in a society where women could not earn a living. The second was to keep land in the family. If this didn’t happen, the widow might marry someone outside the family, and the land would be lost to the family. And the promises of God were tied to the land.

Now, it’s debatable whether or not this practice was still happening in the first century, but it still served as a point of contention between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Sadducees mocked the Pharisees saying, “Whose bride will she be at the resurrection then?” In the story they tell, which seems to be inspired by the book of Tobit, written between the Old and New Testament, there are seven brothers. Which one will she marry in the resurrection?

Jesus responds by pointing out that their whole way of thinking about the resurrection is wrong. They think of it as nothing more than a continuation of life as we

know it. But it isn’t. Their question doesn’t work because marriage is something of this life, not of the life to come.

Depending on your experience, that might sound harsh and unsatisfying, or it might sound like a relief. If you have had a long and satisfying marriage, if you have been married to the same person for 40, 50 years, and you can’t imagine life without them, you might not like what Jesus says. But on the other hand, if you have been divorced, or if you have been widowed and remarried, you might welcome Jesus’ words. It would be kind of awkward if you were married two or three times to think about marriage in the resurrection.

Now Jesus is not saying that relationships are obliterated in the resurrection. He doesn’t say we have no knowledge of people from this life. But relationships are different in the resurrection. They are transformed because we are transformed.

Jesus says we will be like the angels in the resurrection. We will be eternal. Angels don’t marry because they have no need to procreate. Notice he doesn’t say we will become angels. There is nothing in Scripture that says we will become angels. People often say things, especially at the time of a death, that “So-and-so is an angel now,” or, “God needed another angel.” Please don’t ever say that second one, by the way. There is nothing biblical about those statements. The point Jesus is making is that we will be transformed in the resurrection life. It will not be a continuation of this life.

There is much we don’t know about the resurrection life, and we’re going to have to be content with that for now. There is little said about it in Scripture, and speculation is unlikely to bring us to the truth.

But what is certain is the resurrection itself. Jesus corrects the misunderstanding of the Sadducees that there is no resurrection in the Torah by quoting the Torah. In Exodus 3, when God appears to Moses in the burning bush, he says, “I AM the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” If the Sadducees’ way of thinking were correct, God would not be the God of Abraham, because Abraham would no longer exist.

God is the God of living. And even those who have died to this life are alive in Christ. That is why we do not mourn like those who have no hope.