We are people of the resurrection, let us not fear death
Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to [Jesus] and asked him a question: “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers the first married a woman and died childless then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”
Jesus said to them, “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 nor are given in marriage. Indeed, they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And 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.”
We are nearing the end of the story, as we always do at this time of the year. Jesus is in Jerusalem. He has been preaching for a few years and his following has grown immensely – he’s far from the days of him and 12 guys he called away from their labor to follow him. The powerful are worried about his influence, and they are more frequently trying to trip Jesus up, to get him in trouble with the religious or political leaders, to cause people to turn their backs on him, to speed his path towards the cross. Jesus is, after all, making trouble on behalf of the poor, the sick, the widow, the prisoner – and power cannot abide such things.
In today’s reading, the Sadducees – aristocrats from whom the chief priests were selected and the allies of the chief priests – are attempting to bring Jesus down a peg or two. To humiliate him. They do not give credence to oral tradition, therefore they do not believe in the resurrection. They are asking Jesus this question in the hopes he makes himself look like a fool in front of the people, diminishing the power he has over those who follow him. The question the Sadducees ask refers to the practice of leverite marriage, which perpetuates the name of a man who died childless and keeps the wife from being homeless and hungry (this is definitely not the primary concern, but it is one of the reasons Jesus speaks about both divorce and widows as he does – childless unmarried women were often left to their own devices). The first offspring of the marriage after the death of the first husband would be considered his child, and his name would continue. So, the Sadducees want to know, this woman was married seven times, all in accordance with the law, so who is her husband when resurrection occurs..
This is not about marriage. This is about asking a stupid question to make someone else look stupid. The answer Jesus gives, I have been assured by scholars with more knowledge of Greek and the culture at the time, is probably an intentionally stupid answer that the people around him would have found funny. While I do not get the joke, I do see some things Jesus is revealing.
The Sadducees question demonstrates a fundamental problem with human beings. We generally think that things everywhere are the same, the same rules apply, even at the resurrection – and those rules and ways of being are usually the ones we like best. Jesus’ answer asks them, and in turn, those listening from then until now, to imagine something entirely new. Marriage, Jesus says, is for this age, for this time period or life. But the way things will be done in the resurrection will be entirely different. There will be no death – and life without death changes everything. The old rules, the old ways of living no longer apply.
So what might it look like? Life beyond our wildest expectations.
It is, often, very hard to imagine things we haven’t seen or experienced, especially when we’re talking about power or societal rules and assumptions. A really good example of this comes from the fantasy novel and film genre. Oftentimes a fantasy author or tv/film writer will be asked why they made a certain choice in how much violence there is or why all the characters are white and they will respond something like, “Well, that’s because it’s in the middle ages.” Which is a WILD response because the book will have dragons or elves or myriad other things that do not actually exist, but the power structures seem to always remain the same.
An example in real life that is close to my heart is that I am an abolitionist. That means that I believe in a future without prisons or police, without jails or punitive punishments for people who do harm – I believe in a future where most of those things aren’t necessary. Where people have what they need materially and in community and that way of being reduces crime. People often get really, really upset about this idea and stop listening at the no prisons or police and absolutely can’t imagine there can be a world with less crime and no police or prisons. And it is true that for hundreds, even thousands of years, many civilizations have operated this way. It’s also true that there are civilizations that have not. And even if we hadn’t, the lack of a thing having existed before doesn’t mean it is impossible. I have a computer in my pocket that sends invisible waves to space to a receiver that sends those waves back to a different place on earth, and those invisible waves have sound and image and text and information within them. And yet, when it comes to the idea of every human having enough to eat, having healthcare, having everything they need to thrive, we throw up our hands like, “Well, that’s not going to happen,” and we give up before we really started.
There are so many things in life like that, so many things we don’t even try to imagine because it seems impossible. We place limitations on ourselves because of they way things always have been, because of cultural rules and expectations, because the systems of power we know in this world seem to be the only way to do things.
In this interaction, Jesus is pushing people to imagine something entirely new: an existence in which death is no longer a reality. An existence in which the old rules no longer apply and we have no idea what the rules are, other than love.And, because of the resurrection, because we believe that the resurrection happens, that death has been defeated, we can ask ourselves this question now – how would we live if we no longer feared death? What chances would we take? What would lose importance? What would gain importance? What would we be willing to give away, to change, if we truly trusted in the promise of the resurrection?
Fear stops us from doing so much. We hold a death grip onto the things that make us feel safe, which is usually “the way things have always been done.” Change is scary, new things are scary, we could fail, and failure is like a little death. What would you do, what could we do, if we were no longer afraid of death – if we were able to fully give ourselves over to the promise of resurrection?
This is a really important question not just for individuals, but for churches and the broader church. For years, at the national level, the ELCA has been getting studies done on what would help the church grow but it never implements any of the changes out of fear that people will leave and the church will die. Congregations around the country are grasping tightly to who they were in the 80’s, back when they were thriving, because they are afraid if they do new things they will die.
There was a period of time when the ELCA did what was called redevelopments. The national church would work with a church to come to the understanding that they needed to change, the church would commit to complete change – throwing out their bylaws, their mission and values and starting all over again – and the church would receive money to sustain itself through this period of change. The problem was that as soon as most churches got this money and a pastor called to redevelop them, they would refuse to change. Once the idea of change became real, no one was willing. Most of those churches died, and many of the pastors I know who were enlisted to lead redevelopments left ministry completely.
In spite of being a people who claim resurrection, we refuse to lean into the possibility for our own communities. We refuse to let our churches die, in turn refusing them resurrection.
In my chaplaincy work, I never met a person who wished they had taken fewer risks, done fewer things, had fewer relationships, gave away less, or lived a smaller life. What I did meet, over, and over, and over again, is people who wished they had taken more risks, people who wished they had given more – more time, more money, more love. We spend so much of our lives afraid, when we have the promise of something more.
I’m not going to stand up here and pretend that I have no fear of death. I envy those who are blessed with that. But my fear is eased, even erased, in those moments when I get to experience the all encompassing love that I believe we encounter when we come fully into God’s presence.
It is when we lean in to God’s promises of resurrection, losing our fear of death, that we become the most alive. We are vibrant, verdant, glowing with the possibility of what comes next. We are promised resurrection. No matter what comes next, resurrection and eternal life are at the end of our journey. Let us not fear death, for ourselves or our institutions. Let us trust in the promise.
