Now you may know this joke that says: If you go talk to a shrink, they’ll make it all about sex. That is, unless you talk directly about sex. Then they’ll say it’s about power, obviously.
Well, I know it’s probably a strange way to open a sermon but that’s kind of what was on my mind when I read this passage of the Gospel, because if when you’ve heard it this morning you’ve thought: “Great we’re finally going to know if people have sex in heaven”, then you’re going to be disappointed. Although we have a long story about a woman marrying seven times and not being able to conceive a child, this passage isn’t about sex and it isn’t about marriage, whether in this life or even in the afterlife, and actually my bet is that it’s indeed all about power dynamics. But before we get to that, let’s start with the beginning because there are a few background details we need to unpack first to understand the relevance of the story.
Although we have backtracked last week in the first chapters of Luke to honor the feast of All Saints, you may remember that Advent is near and so the lectionary brings us to the last chapters of Luke’s and towards the end of Jesus’s ministry. In chapter 20, the chapter we’re in today, Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem, and is offering in the Temple some very needed teaching and it gets quite confrontational. Jesus isn’t addressing anymore the fishermen and the peasants of Galilee, or even the chiefs of the local synagogues, he is arguing with powerful people who run the Temple: They have a widespread authority, they are friends with the Romans, they are very well educated and they have a lot of money. That is quite true for most of the priests and pharisees Jesus meets in the Holy City, and that’s especially true of the Sadducees, a Jewish sect we encounter for the first time in Luke’s Gospel.
The second thing we need to know to understand this text is this law of the Jews that was called “Levirate marriage”, from “Levir” which means “brother”, and that enabled a man to marry his late brother’s widow. Now it sounds quite odd to us, one of you mentioned at Bible study that we think, I hope, about our brothers and sisters-in-law as brothers and sisters, which makes this tradition feel quite incestuous to us, but at the time it seemed like a good idea for two reasons:
The first one is that the widow couldn’t survive on her own, so it was a way to keep her in the family with a place and a role (mothering children), and then it was also a way of preserving the family and its identity. It was a practical way of dealing with tragedies at a time when death rates were very high. And this also meant that if a man died without having fathered a child, having his brother marry his widow would guaranteed his lineage would be perpetuated. So the law also served a psychological, and even spiritual purpose: It was a way to survive beyond physical death. Although you could die, your name wouldn’t be wiped out of the surface of the earth.
Now it’s very interesting that the Sadducees ask Jesus a question about the Resurrection using this example, which is probably a made up story for argument’s sake. Although by Jesus’s time, a lot of Jews had come to believe in a form of Resurrection, the Sadducees themselves didn’t believe in the Resurrection. The closer idea they had of an eternal life was to make a name for themselves and for their family. But how was it going to work if there was an after life? If the brothers dies one after the other, then everything is right at the woman has one husband at a time, but if all are made alive, who is the woman going to be married to? This indeed does not make sense, and why would God give laws that don’t make sense? We’re not sure that at this point the Sadducees really expected an answer, they were rather trying to ridicule Jesus’s teaching. And it’s certainly a strange argument for us, but if we think about it, it’s not very far from what skeptics may ask Christians today: Will the disabled still be disabled in heaven? If you die when you’re seven, will you still be seven for all eternity? If nothing dies in heaven, then what will we eat? And indeed some may ask if we will still be married or have sex!
But that’s when Jesus steps in and give his own teaching about Resurrection, a two folded response. So let’s listen to it. The first part is as follows: “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the Resurrection from the dead neither marry or are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the Resurrection”
Well, if we can certainly notice that in heaven people don’t die anymore, which means that we have only one life and not a succession of lives as many people believe, the main argument is that marriage is connected to our life on earth and strangely enough it seems, we marry because we die. Which makes sense though with the Sadducees’ argument: People marry to have children and perpetuate their names as their token of eternity. According to Jesus though, in heaven there won’t be any need to have children, not because there won’t be children, but because all will be children of God. Which also means that it is only the marriage as an institution that won’t exist anymore, it certainly does not mean that we won’t be reunited with our spouses in the same way we will be reunited with the rest of our family, and friends, and pets as well with the renewal of all creation (Romans 8:18–25). What this means is that there won’t be assigned roles in our relationships sanctioned by contracts or submission to authority. And that’s why I was saying that this passage is not about sex or marriage, this is really about power. The Sadducees want to know to whom the woman will belong, and Jesus responds: She won’t belong to anyone, only to God. And it makes sense they asked the question because for them all was about hierarchy in their relationships, about who had the power, and thinking some people could be treated as possessions, but in God’s realm people only belong to God and only love guides relationships. If you remember last week, we talked about eternity as well, and I made this remark about how we long to be reunited to our family at God’s table in God’s Kingdom, and yet it’s ironic if we think about how hard it is to just sit together for a Thanksgiving meal. The idea is that our relationships need to be transformed and even redeemed. And that’s what I see in this Gospel today: In heaven, there will be no power dynamics in our relationships.
Let’s not be naive: For now even in the most loving marriage or family, it’s almost impossible to have a relationships freed from authority that turns to control or even possessiveness, or an obedience that doesn’t bring resentment or even shaming, and between equals there’s almost always a sort of competition if not downright jealousy. Father and son, mother and daughter in law, brothers and sisters, we all know these tensions. But that’s what Jesus promises us will tumble down, so it’s very good news indeed.
For this reason, I also see in this text an invitation to change the way we handle our relationships right now: To think of our spouses and children and friends as “Children of God” first, rather than thinking of them in the way we relate to them, how they fill or don’t fill our practical or emotional needs, trying to fix how we would like them to be instead of accepting who they already are, or who God calls them to be. Instead of seeking protection or validation or fulfillment in our close ones, setting them free to be for God, and deciding to look for our own protection and validation in God, because nobody can carry the weight of it all. We also need to honor the flip side of the coin of letting go of controlling others, and that is to refuse at our turn to be controlled, used or possessed, answering first our call from God rather than being told by our close ones whom we are supposed to be or which role we have to fill. It doesn’t mean we don’t have a role, it does not mean we should never submit to or exercise authority, but we have to understand it in its temporal lens with absolute respect towards the persons and respect for ourselves and for God. In this, Jesus is very consistent with the rest of his teaching, asking his disciples to be ready to choose him over their families (Luke 14:25–27). But let’s go back to our text.
Then Jesus adds: “As for the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”
One of the reasons the Sadducees didn’t believe in Resurrection is that they only considered the first five books of the Scriptures, believed to have been written by Moses, as having authority. We know that the belief in resurrection came mostly later, especially with the prophets and the book of Daniel, or in the Book of Job (See our first reading today), but because the Sadducees didn’t admit these sources, that’s why Jesus is quoting Moses to them, to show them that actually, even in Moses, there is a sustained belief in Resurrection: All are alive in God. This lineage of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was plagued with barrenness, all of the wives, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel were barren to start with, and yet the patriarchs became fathers of all the people of Israel through them. Jesus shows there is no need for Levirate marriage or other tricks (Abraham having a son with Sarah’s servant), what we need is trust in God, faith that God can carry out his promise of life no matter the obstacles. Moses may have given laws to fix some problems (as he dealt with divorce: “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so”, Matthew 19:8) but God’s way is better than Moses’s way.
What it means for us is that we also should stop trying to quench our thirst of immortality by trying to create a legacy, or clinging to our memories, or relying on our offspring to fulfill our dreams. When God promises us fullness of life, we can all leave behind those illusions we spend our lives building. The reality is that we have no power to save ourselves and yet does not matter if we believe in what God can do. It is very clear in Mark’s version of the same story where Jesus say to the Sadducees: “Are you not in error because you do not know (…) the power of God?”.
Indeed, and that would be my conclusion, this passage isn’t about sex or marriage or even immortality, it is about power, more specifically the power of God, and what we believe to be possible in God (And Luke has the answer: “Everything”, see 18:27). It’s an invitation to trust. I wonder how the world would look like today if we’d realize we cannot make ourselves immortal by wealth or property, success or recognition, authority or knowledge, but rather cultivate relationships with God that are based on humility and with one another fairness, reciprocity and forgiveness. I think we would all have a taste of eternity.