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SERMONS

Proper 27C (2007)
November 11, 2007

By The Rev. Sylvia Czarnetzky

Job 19:23-27a
Psalm 17:1-8
2 Thessalonians 2:13-3:5
Luke 20:27-38

Once upon a time there was an actress named Elizabeth Taylor. She is a very famous woman, but one of the things she’s best known for by the general public is the fact that she has been married multiple times. Since I couldn’t remember exactly how many times she’d been married, I looked it up (I love the internet!)

Liz Taylor has been married eight times. She has tied the knot eight times, and has untied all eight of those knots. Now, if she’d taken all their last names, she’d now be known as: Liz Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky.  And, since she married one husband on the list twice – Richard Burton –  that means Liz has only had seven husbands. Which makes her even with the woman in today’s gospel, in terms of number of husbands. We might ask ourselves, if, hypothetically, Liz Taylor makes it into heaven, whose wife will she be?    Will she be the wife of husband #1, Nicky Hilton?  He was her first, after all. Will it be Richard Burton, husband # 5 & 6 (depending on how you count!) After all, he did marry her twice! Or will it be Larry Fortenzky, her last husband, to date?

I’m being kind of silly here, but, hey, I didn’t bring the subject of marriage and the afterlife up! The Sadducees did!  They’re the ones who asked the question in the first place!  They’re the ones who came to Jesus with this complicated hypothetical about a woman who had 7 husbands, just like our friend Liz Taylor.

Only the woman in the Sadducees’ hypothetical married seven brothers in the same family, one right after another. She married brother #1, who died, leaving her childless,then she married brother #2, who died, leaving her childless, and she marries brother #3, and so forth and so on until all seven brothers are dead and buried and the woman dies childless. The Sadducees want to know from Jesus: whose wife will she be in the resurrection?  (Lk. 20:33)
                            
By the way, these are the kinds of questions law professors love to ask their students! Law professors love to give them tangled-up, convoluted fact situations and ask their students to apply the law to sort it all out. Only when law professors do this, it’s called the Socratic method! There is method in their madness, because students have to learn how to apply the law to the situations of actual people, so in law school, their professors let them get some practice in by asking them about hypothetical people in hypothetical situations.

But I’m afraid the Sadducees are not so benevolent in their purposes. They are not trying to teach Jesus how to apply the laws of Moses to hypothetical fact situations. Their purpose here is not to educate Jesus, but to trap him!  (O’Driscoll 150-1)

The Sadducees, after all, were not the first group to come to Jesus in the temple with questions designed to get Jesus to say something incriminating. This whole section of Luke’s gospel begins right after Jesus’s triumphal procession into Jerusalem. His first stop?  The Temple. The first thing Jesus does when he gets to the temple is to get angry, and to drive out the moneychangers and merchants from the temple. Jesus accuses them  of turning a “house of prayer” into a “den of robbers.”  (Lk. 19:45-6) Having drive the merchants from the temple, Jesus settles in for a teaching series at the temple.  Luke tells us that Jesus spent days “teaching in the temple.  The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him, but they did not find anything they could do for all the people were spellbound by what they heard.”  (19:47-8)

So the challenges begin, as Jesus stands in the temple.   The first challenge comes from the chief priests, the scribes and the elders, who want to know the source of his authority.  (20:1-8) Then Jesus gets asked a question about paying taxes to Caesar, which is a question Luke says is designed to “trap” Jesus -- to create grounds for handing Jesus over to the authorities to be killed,  (Lk. 20:20)

But Jesus is too clever to fall into the trap they’d set for him. “This whole chapter in Luke’s gospel is full of tension and confrontation for Jesus.”  (O’Driscoll 150) And the Sadducees are next in line, with their question about the resurrection.

They, too, seem to be setting a trap for Jesus (Cousar 593) asking him to take sides in a controversy between the Pharisees and the Sadducees over the resurrection of the dead. The Pharisees believed in it. The Sadducees did not. (Culpepper 388)

But is this a genuine question?  For this question about the resurrection came “not from bereaved persons seeking hope or from believers searching for more clarity….  Rather, Jesus is being interrogated by persons who already were fixed in their position that there was no resurrection of the dead.” (Craddock 469)

So the Sadducees ask Jesus this question about resurrection and marriage and the law of Moses, not because they really want to know what Jesus thinks, (Taylor 203) but rather because they want to show Jesus just how right they are!  (Craddock 469) It’s a game, where people whose minds are already made up –
people who have no intention of “being influenced by the answers” — ask a question that is, ultimately designed to show the rightness of their own position.(469) I’m sure that’s never happened to you. It’s a non-question question

So the Sadducees ask Jesus their non-question question. And Jesus gives them a non-answer answer! but he doesn’t directly answer their question, whose wife will this woman be in the resurrection? Instead, Jesus “changes the subject, shifting the focus from marriage to God, and asserting that in resurrection life… neither marriage [n]or death are primary concerns., since God is the One to whom our whole being and life is turned.”” (Pasquarello 1) Resurrected beings aren’t like earthly beings, Jesus says, “because they are like angels and are children of God.” Jesus cites Moses himself for the proposition that resurrection happens.  (Lk. 20:37) Then Jesus concludes that God is “God not of the dead but of the living;…”  (Lk. 20:38)

Jesus asserts that “life in the resurrection will not simply be a continuation of life as we know it….” (Culpepper 389) Jesus suggests that “God’s future cannot be understood as an extension of our present existence. It is not the case that we can take what we like out of our current life, raise it to the nth power, and call it heaven. Resurrection entails transformation.” (Cousar 594)

The truth is that we won’t get our deepest questions about the afterlife answered until we ourselves get there – resurrection life will remain a mystery to us, as long as we are on this side of the veil. (Culpepper 390) But it is human nature to wonder about the reality that lies beyond death; it is natural for times of immense change and turmoil and threat” to raise our anxiety about life and death. What Jesus says about death “comes across the centuries and speaks to our own anxieties and fears and hopes about life and death.”  (O’Driscoll 151) And when Jesus outwits the Sadducees, he also redirects our focus onto God, and God’s relationship with us, and the eternal impact of that relationship. (Lectionary homiletics 2)

“But Jesus’s answer is more than merely clever. It shows the Sadducees as belonging to ‘this age,’ so preoccupied with the details of [Mosaic law] that they are unable to contemplate something radically new, the miracle of the resurrection.  (Cousar 594)

So the long and the short of it is that the Sadducees’ attempts to make Jesus look bad fail.  (Cousar 593) In this battle of wits, Jesus wins, because the very next line in Luke’s gospel tells us that, after this exchange, folks backed off from Jesus.

Luke tells us that, after this, the religious authorities “no longer dared to ask [Jesus] another question.”  (20:40) So, “[t]heir strategy of posing trick questions had not only failed, it had backfired.” (594)

Now, we all know how this story turns out – Jesus ends up being tried, convicted, and crucified, so he has only postponed the inevitable. That train is still on the track.

But let me end with this thought: Even though Jesus outsmarts the Sadducees in this “verbal skirmish,” (O’Driscoll 150) that’s not why we worship him. Even though Jesus avoids falling into the verbal traps set for him by the religious leaders of the day, that’s not why we worship him.         

We worship him because we believe that God, in Jesus Christ, did something so amazing for us, that we’re still talking about it, two thousand years later. Jesus died for our sins, was resurrected from the dead, then ascended to the Father’s right hand. That’s why we worship him – not for his wits or his cleverness,but for his willingness to lay down his life to save us. Amen.

Works Cited:

Cousar, Charles B. et al. Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV – Year C.  Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994. 

Craddock, Fred B., et al.  Preaching Through the Christian Year, Year C. Valley Forge:Trinity Press Intl. 1994.

Culpepper, R. Alan. “The Gospel of Luke.” The New Interpreter’s Bibl. e IX. Nashville:Abingdon Press, 1995.

Lectionary Homiletics webpage. 

O’Driscoll, Herbert. A Time for Good News: Reflections on the Gospel for People on the Go, Year C. Toronto, Anglican Book Centre, 1991.

Pasquarello, Michael III. “Blogging Toward Sunday.”  Christian Century Blog 2007.

Taylor, Barbara Brown. “God of the Living.” Home by Another Way. Cambridge: Cowley Press, 1999. 203-7.

Taylor, Liz. Wikipedia entry.