Here’s the sermon for November 9 and 10, 2019, on Luke 20:27-38 and Job 19:23-27a. I drew from several commentaries for this sermon, including this one by Timothy Siburg, two on WorkingPreacher from Emerson Powery and David Lose, and this post from Justin Taylor at TheGospelCoalition.
In a sermon about a year ago, I asked everyone to write down a question you had for God. A lot of the questions dealt with two topics: First, some variation of “Why does God allow suffering?”, and second, “What happens after we die? What does heaven look like?”
That’s the question the Sadducees in Luke 20 claim to be asking Jesus.
Now, it should be obvious, but as we try to understand this story, remember Jesus is Jewish. So are the disciples. Everybody in this story is Jewish. They all believe in the same God.
But similar to Christian denominations today, different groups of Jews have different beliefs. The Pharisees are one group we often hear about, and they’re generally concerned with religious purity and following God’s law correctly.
We don’t hear about the Sadducees as much, but their thing is they only believe in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. That’s their entire Bible.
Since those five books don’t really talk about life after death, they don’t believe in it. They believe when you’re dead, you’re dead. That’s it. No afterlife, no resurrection. The dead stay dead. That’s the Sadducees (and that’s why they’re so sad, you see?) Sadducees? Sad, you see? Now you’ll remember them!
In the book of Deuteronomy, (one of the parts of the Scriptures accepted by the Sadducees) there’s a practice known as Levirate marriage, where if a man dies without fathering a child, his brother should take the dead man’s widow as a wife. The idea is to not let the man’s bloodline die out, which is important in that culture for things like inheritance and land ownership.
Even in the Bible, levirate marriage is never very common. Genesis refers to it in the story of Tamar and it’s alluded to in Ruth, but it’s just not something that happened much. It’s definitely not normal by Jesus’ time. But it’s part of the religious history all the Jewish people in this story are familiar with.
So the Sadducees come to Jesus and they ask him a question: “Say, Jesus, since you’re so smart, we have a question. Say there’s this woman, and she has been married seven times to brothers. In the resurrection (which by the way, we don’t believe in), whose wife will she be?”
Their question is entirely hypothetical. It’s like wondering how old people’s bodies will look when they’re in heaven, like if Grandma dies when she’s 95, will she spend eternity in a 95-year-old body, or will she look 50, or 18.
Sounds like an interesting question, but the answer is that it’s just not something that matters in the resurrection, because that’s not how eternal life works!
The Sadducees are not actually worried about how marriage works in the resurrection; they’re trying to disprove the entire idea of life after death.
Jesus avoids their trap. Instead of debating afterlife logistics with them, he tells them they’re missing the point. There is a resurrection, there is life after death, but it’s not the same as this life.
We can’t explain it by the standards of this world, because the things that seem so important now, Jesus says, fade in comparison to the promise of the Gospel.
This is a strange-sounding Bible story about an issue most of us are not particularly concerned with, which is exactly why this story is so believable.
How many times have you heard of people getting stuck on issues that don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things?
I’ve heard of major church committee fights over mowing a tiny section of lawn next to a cemetery. I’ve heard of people leaving churches because of fights over a piano. There are many, many stories of churches fighting over the color of carpet or paint. Whole denominations have been distinguished by being opposed to card-playing and dancing. Churches are split today over whether Jesus can only speak through pastors who have the right body parts. I can’t imagine God is happy about that.
There’s a Lutheran word you should all know, “Adiaphora.” Adiaphora means “Things that are not essential, things neither commanded nor forbidden in the Word of God.”
Things like whether or not the pastor wears a robe, or whether the music in worship comes from an organ or a guitar or a recording, or whether there are candles and flowers on the altar, all of those are adiaphora. They’re not essential to who we are as God’s people, or to the ministry we are called to do.
Look at the amount of time and energy so many churches spend worrying and fighting about things that are not the Gospel, and imagine the good that could be done if we used that energy to love our neighbors like Jesus said. The color of paint or the sinfulness of playing cards has precious little to do with what Jesus died for. Learn to distinguish the things that are adiaphora from the things that matter.
The point Jesus makes to the Sadducees is that reality includes more than this earthly world. The point is we are children of God, and death cannot end that relationship. As Jesus says, “To God, all are alive.” We can expect to be reunited with our loved ones and with all the saints like we talked about last week, but the details of how those relationships will work are a mystery. But the promise is it will be good. We’ll be with God. We’ll be with our Redeemer.
As Christians, we know—as Job proclaimed—our Redeemer lives. We know God has claimed us and is giving us eternal life, and that affects the way we live. Faith gives us the strength to persevere through the trials of life knowing that even when it’s hard to see, we are living in God’s kingdom now and for eternity.
Now, that doesn’t mean we can just ignore this world. I think sometimes non-Christians believe Christians only care about getting to heaven, not about earth. Sometimes we get a reputation of only caring about eternity, ignoring the needs around us.
They see us using eternity as an excuse for not caring for the planet, an excuse for ignoring others’ suffering because, after all, it’ll all come out right in the end. We’re really good at finding excuses to ignore God’s commands to care for creation and to love our neighbors, and sometimes heaven can be a convenient excuse, a way to let ourselves off the hook.
And yet, as C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity,
“A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean we are to leave the present world as it is.
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven.”
Instead of spending our time and energy asking, “How is our future in heaven going to be like this world we know?” we should be asking, “How can this world we know become more like heaven?”
Instead of trying to grasp heaven through the lens of this world, we should be trying to understand this world in light of the reality of heaven.
We know the promise of eternal life. We don’t know the details, and that’s ok, but we believe and confess the reality of the resurrection. In the light of the resurrection, so many of our other worries and fears fade away.
We don’t have to worry about carving our legacy into stone with an iron pen to be remembered. We don’t have to worry about whether we have an enduring legacy if our bloodlines don’t continue.
Instead, because we know our eternal future, we are set free to live and serve and worship together. We are set free to not get hung up on the adiaphora things.
We are set free to be good stewards of what God has trusted to us, to use our gifts to bless others.
You are free to care about the needs in this world, to work for the needs of your neighbors. You are set free to be Christ’s body, to be God’s hands and feet in the world.
Beloved of God, may you believe in the promise of eternal life. May you know that your Redeemer lives.
And may God use you to bless the world and build the kingdom of God. Amen