“Resurrection Life: An Urgent Appeal”
Luke 20:27-38
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
11/6/16
Sadducees.
Bless their hearts. Even more legalistic than the Pharisees, Sadducees exclude the
writings of historians, prophets, sages, and psalmists from their scripture. Driven
by a pathological desire for control, they honor only the Torah. And they give
particular attention to laws regarding governance of the temple itself, in
particular the privileges of the priesthood. The Sadducees become an instructive
example of what happens when human beings fix our faith in material things, when
we devote ourselves to ideas and understandings that we declare absolute for
everyone. When the temple is destroyed in 66AD,
the Sadducees, having laid the groundwork for their own demise, completely
disappear. Without the temple building, they have no identity, no vision, no
hope.
Some thirty years earlier, a
Nazarene rabbi shows up. He exposes wiggle room in the law. He welcomes the
unwanted and loves the unlovable. He uses story as an authoritative means of
teaching God’s word. The Sadducees take profound offense at this. And it gets
worse.
One day Jesus storms Jerusalem on a
colt that’s not even green broke. Armed only with leafy branches, his militia declares
not war but joy: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace
in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” (Luke 19:38)
After that, Jesus really throws
Legos on the floor at night. He runs all the money changers out of the temple.
How can you control people if you don’t keep them off balance with fear and
grasping at you for help? This whole grace thing of Jesus is just too much. So,
the Sadducees decide to give Jesus some of his own medicine. Jesus tells
parables; they’ll do the same.
They run into a problem, though.
Parables are both a pedagogy and an art form. They are told to create a kind of
crisis for hearers by suggesting a broader reality, by revealing new territory
and daring people to step out in faith. Only patient, compassionate teachers
who are as willing to learn and grow as they are eager for their students to
learn and grow can use parables effectively. The Sadducees don’t get this.
Their preposterous story tries to ensnare Jesus in a legal quandary. A woman
marries seven brothers in succession according to the law. She dies childless.
Whose wife will she be in the resurrection?
It seems to me that both the
character and substance of Jesus’ response can instruct all of us right now.
The Sadducees intend to attack, embarrass, and tear down, but Jesus refuses to
answer in kind. Taking their question seriously, he says, in effect, Ah, but you misunderstand. As a gift of this
age, marriage witnesses to the fundamental character of God. God is
relationship, faithfulness, and creativity. And Resurrection transcends all of
our laws and rituals. In the kingdom of heaven, belonging and intimacy look
nothing like marriage as we know it.
Then Jesus addresses the Sadducees’
real issue, the resurrection itself. Finding nothing to support resurrection
and an afterlife in their literal reading of the law, they dismiss the idea altogether.
That’s understandable, and Jesus is more than understanding. With deep
compassion, he challenges the Sadducees and invites them into a different
reality.
“And the fact that the dead are
raised,” Jesus says. He calls it, “the fact.” Then he mentions Moses. Remember,
Jewish tradition attributes the law itself to Moses’ own hand. Moses’ own
experience of God, says Jesus, implies Resurrection. Standing before the burning
bush, Moses hears Yahweh say, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham,
the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” (Exodus 3:6)
Jesus reveals Yahweh to be the God
of Moses’ ancestors, and not just when they were alive, but in that present
moment. How, Jesus is saying, can God be the God of the living and the God
of those who died, if those who died are not in some way alive in God?
Throughout his
ministry, Jesus has been revealing a great wonder: He is the Resurrected One
even before the trials of Friday and the mystery of Sunday. Even as he visits
the cities and towns, and walks the backroads of ancient Palestine, Jesus
inhabits both this age and the next.
He participates in the totality – past, present, and future – of God’s dynamic eternity.
Jesus continually invites us to play
around in this gracious paradox. Remember what he tells the Pharisees: “For, in
fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” (Luke 17:21b)
This is both good news and heavy responsibility.
While the kingdom is, to use Jesus’ words, “in fact” here and now, our
experience of it comes as the gift not of mere belief, but of our intentional participation
in it. We can, “in fact,” choose to live in the kingdom, to “practice
resurrection.”1 We can also, “in fact,” choose death. We can choose
to hold grudges, to nurse wounds, to spew our loathing of those we fear, and
those we refuse to like – and those who refuse to like us.
At 53, I’m still helping to keep
the average age of our congregation and our denomination low. And never in my
“young” life have I experienced a zombie apocalypse like the one we’re living
now. Never have I felt so much scathing judgment, so much fear, so much
rhetoric of deadness. I feel our circles of trust constricting. We choose and
even create heroes who do more to cheapen and end life than to reconcile and
heal. Throughout our global, national, and local cultures, even in our families,
we are stumbling at each other in grotesque decay. We are feasting on death.
Tuesday’s results do matter to me.
But if Tuesday’s results matter to me
more than you do, then my faith lies
in something other than the God revealed in Jesus Christ. And like many of you,
I am teetering on the edge. I have to face down that hideous and hateful zombie
within me every single day, because I keep projecting my anxieties and
prejudices onto people whose opinions differ from mine.
If we keep marrying ourselves to
the seven brothers of death – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, and those
two favorite sons, envy, and pride – to whom will we belong in the resurrection?
Brothers and sisters, God calls and
equips us to live as Resurrection people here and now. And we cannot afford to
wait until it feels safe to do so. Today
is the time, the Kairos time, the
holy time to recognize and confess the deathliness within ourselves rather than
looking for it and condemning it in our neighbors. Now, when seeking to
reconcile with one another, we risk much.
But when refusing to reconcile, we do, “in fact,” risk everything.
The Sadducees attack Jesus, and he
loves them with an invitation to experience Resurrection in their own lives, to
practice living as children of the living God, children of the God of the
living.
You are a child of God, too. So are
those around you, and across every aisle from you – all of them.
Within you, right now, lives a particular strength, a particular gratitude, and
a particular Love. This is God’s gift to you to for experiencing and
participating in Resurrection life. May you recognize, embrace, and share that
gift. It’s a gift that only you can live. And without it neither you nor we are
whole.
The peace of Christ be with us all.
1Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation
Front,” Collected Poems: 1957-1982. North Point Press: San Francisco, 1984.
P.151-152.
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