The resurrection—one of the essentials of the Christian faith.  I’m not really sure that a person can properly call him or herself a Christian without believing in Christ’s resurrection and the resurrection to come.  No making metaphors of the resurrection—“a changed life here, now.”  A person may be attracted to the things Jesus says: that’s good!  A person may be impressed by the example of how Jesus lived and find in that an inspiring example for living this life: that’s good!  But Christians believe that Jesus truly died, was truly buried; that his truly dead body truly lay in the grave from Friday afternoon until sometime in the first, darkest hours of Sunday, and that he then truly rose from the dead, alive, gloriously alive, in his own body, the marks of his crucifixion evident.  Beyond our experience.  Beyond our science.  Not beyond possibility: “all things are possible with God” (Mk 10:27).  “Is anything too difficult [too wonderful] for the Lord?” (Gen 18:14).

How, is the mystery and the power, and these are in and with God.

The Sadducees were not interested in mystery.  Who were these guys?  They were priests, which means they were an elite, closed group, a clan, a caste.  Way back when my Sunday morning Bible study was just getting started, when we were reading about and discussing the establishment of the priesthood, I mentioned that God had set a trap in the priesthood.  It would have been possible for the trap never to have been sprung, had the priests faithfully, lovingly, reverently lived their sacred obligations, their sacred privileges before the Lord among the people.  Being also fallible, fickle, feeble human beings, they did not.  They were tempted, fell, and fell into a habit of falling.  They cobbled together their patchwork defense and, like everyone else, became experts at self-justification.

The people brought the firstborn of their herds and the first harvest of their crops to present to the Lord, in thanks and praise, and also to atone for their sins, the unintentional and otherwise.  Unlike the other tribes of Israel, the priests had no specific geographic region of their own, but they did have all that the people brought to God at the Temple: meat, bread, grain, oil, wine, gold, silver, jewels—wealth.  The priests became quite wealthy.  It was nice to be a priest.  They would be the last to go hungry.  They dressed in the finest garments, in keeping with the sacred privilege of their office.  Wealth is not a trap for everyone; it doesn’t have to be, but it can be and too often is for many.

The Sadducees were priests, wealthy priests, established, connected, entrenched.  The last thing they wanted was anything or anyone who would or could question or shine an inquiring light upon their elite privilege.  The last thing they wanted was anything or anyone who could or would challenge their established power and unchallenged authority.

And the Sadducees did not believe in any resurrection.  Everyone has their go-to part of the Bible.  They could take or leave the rest, but their treasured part is like the Bible itself and all God’s Word, to them.  Thomas Jefferson held onto the ethical teachings of Jesus and felt no great regret tossing the rest of it.  Some Bible publishers print just the New Testament, maybe together with the psalms.  So, the rest can be dispensed with?  Not really necessary; doesn’t really add anything important?  If you could cut a verse or two out of the Bible, which would it be?  What books of the Bible would you cut, if it were up to you; which would you definitely keep?  For the Sadducees, the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, were Scripture, the Word of God, authoritative and complete.  The rest of the writings—the psalms, the proverbs (not to mention the prophets)—might be useful, helpful, but they weren’t necessary.  If it didn’t come through Moses, it wasn’t authoritative, or obligatory.

The Sadducees now come to Jesus there in the Temple, their temple, their turf.  “‘Teacher,’ they said, ‘Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother’” (12:19).  Say what, now?  That is the old Jewish teaching; the term that gets used for it, though it’s not a word you’ll find in the Bible, is levirate marriage, from the Latin word for brother-in-law.  Such a marriage is at issue in the last part of Ruth.  Just consider those genealogies that come early in Matthew and Luke’s accounts, not to mention the genealogies in the Old Testament.  It was deemed a most sorrowful thing for any man’s line to die out: didn’t seem like it was part of God’s plan, any more than death had been part of God’s plan—blessedness was in life, living, being fruitful, multiplying, unbroken continuity, here.

All this was understood.  The Sadducees now put their question—a hypothetical question concerning the law and the talk about resurrection that had been around for a long time, talk that made the Sadducees seethe.  So they came up with a scenario that would make the resurrection an absurdity in terms of the law as given through Moses.  “Now there were seven brothers.  The first one married and died without leaving any children” (12:20): Lord knows that happens, even today!  “The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child” (12:21): in that society, marrying her would be the right thing to do, the righteous thing to do.  The patriarch Judah, son of Jacob, gets into trouble with his daughter-in-law Tamar because he did not follow through on this ancient custom, this expectation of righteousness (Genesis 38).  “It was the same with the third.  In fact, none of the seven left any children” (12:21-22).  A tragedy!  A curse.  Ridiculous?  Preposterous?  Maybe, but in an age where life could be short and sickness fatal, not entirely outside the realm of possibility, and law must account for possibilities.  Indeed, the scribes and rabbis expounded the law in order to try to cover as many scenarios as might come along: the law had to account for everything, as all human circumstances had to come under the law.  “Last of all, the woman died too” (12:22).  Nothing more to be said; walk away in silence—unless there is a resurrection.  But if there is . . . .

“At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?” (12:23).  As George Carlin might have said: Ah, ha ha!!  Gotcha.  You may remember what Jesus says in response, so hold onto his words for a moment.  What are the Sadducees assuming?  They are assuming that resurrection life will be a repeat of life as we know it now, only much longer, like forever.  They are assuming that marriage is eternal rather than temporal.  Have you ever thought about the marriage vow: “until death do us part,” if you included that part in your vows?  Some opt to leave that out.

The Sadducees, like many of us, use what they know to imagine something they don’t know.  What will it be like, in the resurrection?  Paul tried to explain that it wasn’t going to be, couldn’t be, just like what we know now.  John has something to say about the matter also, in his first letter: “Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be.  We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is” (1 Jn 3:2). This side of the veil, we don’t really know “what we will be,” except that “we will be like Him.”  Jesus came to his disciples in his glorified body, what Paul sort of mysteriously refers to as the spiritual body (1 Cor 15:44), but we don’t really know what is meant by that, except that it is something beautiful, good, healed, whole, holy, and eternal: imperishable, immortal.  It isn’t like what we have or know now.  It’s different, better, and that’s about all we can confidently say.  It’s yet another of those things which we must leave, faithfully, in God’s entirely capable hands.  Must there be so many of those things?

“Jesus replied, ‘Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?’” (12:24).  The Sadducees would hear that as an insult, an affront, and their pride would rise, offended, indignant.  Just who does this nobody from nowhere think he is, talking to us like that?!  Yet Jesus is only telling them the truth, and not in an ugly way but in a plain, even gentle way.  Have some humility, Jesus is urging.  Let God be God—which is another way of saying trust God and believe His Word.  We trust what we know; therefore, if we would trust God, we must know God; put differently, if we do not truly know God, we cannot truly trust God.

What is it to know the Scriptures?  It isn’t just to have this and that verse memorized, though that doesn’t hurt.  It isn’t even to be able to summarize, though that can help.  To know the Scriptures is to make time for them, to spend time with them, to listen, to allow oneself to be shaped by them, rather than always attempting to reshape them into our own image.  To know the Scriptures is to know the power of God and the character of God.  Jesus suggests, based upon what the Sadducees are saying, that they seem not to know God’s power or character.  And these are the priests, whom God long ago had specially set apart to bring the people to God and God to the people.

As Paul and John suggest, how we will live and what we will be in the Resurrection can’t be neatly overlaid upon the patterns we know in this mortal life.  Jesus tells those listening that, “When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven” (12:25).  Not if the dead rise but when: no metaphors, here.  In that life, Jesus tells us, the life to come, there will be no marriage.  What?  We will have and be spiritual bodies, whatever that might mean.  We aren’t now, so we don’t know.  But we do know Jesus, and we know what Scripture tells us of his time with his disciples after he arose but before he ascended.  And what Jesus is saying just here would certainly require another sermon, another time.  Marriage is for this life.  Love is forever.

“Now about the dead rising—have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the account of the burning bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? [not was the God of . . .]  He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.  You are badly mistaken!” (12:26-27).  Jesus argues here in what may seem to us an odd way, but this was the way the scribes and rabbis argued among themselves; the Sadducees were familiar with this way of applying Scripture, and it carried weight and authority.  It would be poignantly romantic but maybe a little unexpected for a widower to say, many years after the death of his wife, “I am her husband,” just as it would be a little unexpected for him to say, “I am married to her.”  It would be typical, expected, to hear him say, “I was married to her; I was her husband, then she died.”  God doesn’t say to Moses, I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, while they were alive, as though death were of course the end of that relationship, that connection.  Death, of course, being the end of everything and the ultimate limit of all power.  God says I am the God of these: present tense; Jesus is telling us that this is not present tense for God only.  That present tense pulls Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob out of the darkness and keeps them in the light, the light of the Word, God’s Word of love, life, and blessing.  If death has the power to break that relationship, a power even God can’t undo, then there is a power greater than God, and that, I think you’d agree, would be a problem.

The Old Testament, especially in the psalms, laments what comes after death: Sheol, the shadowy world of the shades of those who had lived.  Such thinking seems to have been common throughout the region: Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Greeks had similar views.  One might argue that Sheol is a foreshadowing of hell, but Sheol doesn’t seem to be a place of punishment, just neutral, hovering, nothing to do and nowhere to go, like the first circle of Dante’s Inferno.  However, there are also several places in the psalms, as well as what could be found in Job and several of the prophets, that sing of something else, glorious, radiant, hopeful, fulfilling, freeing, and holy.  A time of waking, awaking into unending blessedness in the presence of God.

This new, this next life is necessarily different from all we have known here, until we begin to know Jesus who, as John so memorably reminds us, is the Resurrection and the Life.  To reject the Resurrection, it seems to me, must also be to reject Christ, who did not come just to remind us all to be good and to be nice—or else.  To embrace Christ is both to strive, more and more, to live his teaching and to hold, tenaciously—faithfully—to hope of the Resurrection.