Bible Reading: Job 19:23-27 & Luke 20:27-38
Dear Friends
In this week’s gospel reading in Luke 20: 27-38 with the scribes and chief priests silenced, the Sadducees enter the contest. By way of background: the Sadducees were the ones who had primary responsibility for the Temple and, interestingly, were for this reason often at odds with the scribes and Pharisees (who tended the Synagogues). Their concern for the Temple, however, explains why the Sadducees would now aid their rivals and seek to discredit Jesus, as they would have been particularly offended by the disturbance he recently caused at the Temple. The Sadducees also honoured only the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Jewish Scriptures (what we call the Old Testament). And because they believed there is no theology of an afterlife in those books, they did not believe in the resurrection.
And this is the point they press with Jesus, referring to a practice described in Deuteronomy (25:5-10) called levirate marriage that sought to ensure the preservation of the family name by stipulating that a man should marry the childless widow of his brother. Taking this command to the extreme seven brothers for one widow they ask whose wife she will be in the (“supposed,” they would likely add) afterlife.
But Jesus confounds the Sadducees by making two moves. First, he says that they’re primary assumption that the afterlife is simply “more” of the life we enjoy here is flawed. Resurrection life isn’t more, it’s different, and it won’t be marked by the same things with which we mark this life. That doesn’t mean we won’t recognize those with whom we’ve been in relationship in this life, only that all things including our relationships will be different as we live in the nearer presence of God.
Second, Jesus referring, by the way, to the primary stories in the Pentateuch points out that God continues to be in relationship with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, thereby establishing that life with God doesn’t end with death. Why? Because, as Jesus answers, God is the God of the living, not the dead, and so those who live in God enjoy life eternal with God.
Solomzi