We the Sadducee

One of my favorite things about the Sadducees we encounter so often in the Gospels, is just how much we see them as, ‘the bad guys,’ in the story, when, on closer examination, it turns out that we are just like them. 

Remember the story of David and Bathsheba. Remember the story Nathan, one of God’s prophets, tells David? The story is about a rich man who stole a poor man's single, beloved lamb to give to a guest, instead of using one of his own many animals. When David heard this, he became enraged and declared the rich man deserved to die and must pay back four times the value of the lamb. Nathan then used the story to reveal that David was the man in the parable, connecting the rich man's actions to David's own sin of taking Bathsheba and having her husband Uriah killed. It’s utterly stunning how judgmental we can be of others, while missing the giant log in our own eye, or, to put it bluntly, the sin in our own lives. 

So here we have an interesting tale. We have those who know and teach the law of God, the Sadducees - taunting Jesus about this whole belief in the resurrection he seems to be floating around out there. Instead of directly trying to refute his claims; they want to discredit him, show him to be unable to answer basic questions of logic and law and therefore, as one unworthy to speak of God or God’s law.

Notice, Jesus doesn’t answer their question at all. He doesn’t go after their character or try to discredit them. He simply gets to the heart of the actual issue at hand and so denies the premise of the question: there is no marriage in the age of the resurrection from the dead. No one is married or given in marriage. Marriage is for this current age only, because it is through sexual union in marriage that next generations of God’s people are produced. But in the age of the resurrection, “death is no more,” as we hear in revelation; so we do not need sexual reproduction. The woman “cannot die anymore, because she [and all who are raised]’ Jesus says, are like angels of God, being children of the resurrection.”  

Jesus goes on to reference the story of the burning bush where Moses “speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” and adds that “he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”

And here Jesus tells us straightforwardly what he reveals of God in both deeds and words elsewhere. Jesus tells us that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - long dead by Jesus’s lifetime - were not simply alive to God in Moses’s day, but are alive to God now in Jesus’s day. Think for a moment about how this story parallels that of Jesus’s own transfiguration - a glimpse of how things are already in God - when Peter, James and John see Moses and Elijah; or how the Rich man from the parable of the the rich man and the poor man Lazarus, sees Abraham, and asks him to intervene with God and save him from hell. Jesus reiterates that he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of [the prophets, patriarchs, the faithful] are alive."

This is good news and the ground of hope and assurance for believers. But we’re then presented with something that makes most modern western Christians quite uncomfortable. Jesus makes it clear to the Sadducee that only those who are worthy of resurrection will see it.

Immediately, when confronted with this, how easy is it for us to descend into the position of the Sadducee trying to determine what makes us or others, “worthy of the resurrection,” even to the point of undermining others who are struggling to see or find God in this world. Having just heard the parable, how easily do we slip right back into the place of the Sadducee here, attempting to mark out our own legalistic ruleset for what constitutes worth before God. 

God’s response to us is right in front of our faces here: it is Jesus himself. It is by his taking on human flesh, his becoming one of us, his uniting us to himself, that our sins - along with Abraham’s, Jacob’s, David’s, Peter’s - are put to death on the cross so that we are made alive in him and by him, and joined with those patriarchs, with those Kings, with those prophets, with those whom we love, to God. It is not by our righteous judgment of others; it is not our condemnation, or criticism, or our punishment of them using civil law or weapons of the state or military force, or by complicated arguments, or reasoning properly and self righteously, like the Sadducees. It is in and by Christ alone - by having been joined to him by him - that you and I are made worthy. 

The problem with the Sadducees’ approach, and too often our own, is that we think we define what makes ourselves and others worthy. Jesus embodies the very challenge to that propensity of self protection, to self rule, to self righteousness that we have. His response to us is this: I am the truth, the way and the life. Seek me and I will help you follow. Seek to share my love for you with others, and I will make you a vessel, a seed of holiness. Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word. AMEN