The Sadducees' ridiculous story

Sermon for Pentecost XXII, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY
Text: Luke 20:27-38

We are all familiar with the very first verse of the Bible, you know, the one that says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the deep…” It’s been in every Bible we’ve ever opened, but  there’s one small problem with that wording and our belief based on it, because that is not exactly what the original Hebrew says. The very first Hebrew word in Genesis is “Bere’sheet,” which indicates an ongoing action. Translating the Hebrew closely, the first sentence of Genesis would read in English, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep…” This creates a problem for us because it changes a possible understanding of the story of Creation. Where we might read “In the beginning…” to say God created the Earth out of nothing, “Bere’sheet” makes it clear that the Earth already existed along with God. If we believe that God made the Earth from nothing. We would argue with anyone who claims that this familiar passage should say something different, and we would defend it vigorously because that opening is so familiar and so important to us. It is part of the foundation of our faith. This is where the Sadducees are in this morning’s Gospel reading. They don’t believe in a resurrection of the dead because that is not what the Torah says to them, and they have an issue with Jesus over it.

The Sadducees read scripture strictly, almost literally, and they only recognized the Torah, or the first five books of the Jewish Bible as authoritative. They didn’t recognize the authority of the other books like Chronicles, Judges, Job, the Psalms, or the Book of Daniel. The Pharisees, on the other hand, did recognize all of the books of the Bible, and they read them more spiritually, or figuratively. They agreed with Jesus that there was a resurrection of the dead. What happens in the gospel reading is a theological fight over resurrection, where the Sadducees come up with a ridiculous, over-the-top scenario that they just know will disprove Jesus’ assertion of resurrection. And Jesus essentially ignores it, and he goes on to say that Moses referred to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob when Moses encountered God in the burning bush. From Moses’ words, Jesus inferred that those three patriarchs were resurrected into eternal life, meaning that God was of the living, not the dead. The argument is a little convoluted and hard to follow, and it challenges the Jewish notion of Ha Sheol, or the place where the dead go. Sheol was neither Heaven nor Hell and not a place where souls went to hang out in eternal life. It was just a non-judgmental place where the dead went. Jesus emphasized the Pharisaic belief of resurrection, and presented it as a transition to eternal life, leaving Sheol out of the picture.

There is a bit of irony in the Sadducees’ argument because the example they give is a description of a levirate marriage. In older Judaism, if a man died, his brother or some other male relative was obligated to marry his widow to carry on the deceased’s name through the children they would have. That itself was a form of resurrection and eternal life, where a levirate marriage brings back to life the dead man’s name, and keeps it alive well into the future. But the Sadducees do not seem to be aware of that irony, or maybe that was their preference. They fight against Jesus’ “innovative theology” that they reject as unorthodox. They needed to protect their belief of no resurrection and God’s guardianship of the Covenant because God acted only in the world of the living, not in Sheol. Jesus confronts their defense with their own accepted scripture to show that God acts in the world of the living and in the world of the eternal living. Where the Sadducees limit God to this world to ensure their good status with God, Jesus and the Pharisees see God acting beyond this world for the good of everyone. The Sadducees have an obligatory, dogmatic view of faith that they must protect, while Jesus looks to the will of God that faith can’t adequately describe.

So many times I see people post on social media that the Bible appears to say something specific when in reality they are protecting a dogmatic belief they have. Their identity as a Christian, or more seriously, their salvation, is entirely dependent on holding specific beliefs. That leads them to put their needs ahead and on top of what scripture actually says. The Sadducees attempted to protect their dogmatic belief that there is no resurrection with a patently ridiculous scenario, thinking that their interpretation would hold true for all of scripture. Jesus counters with an example of another way of looking at scripture that supports resurrection. It's not a question of who is right and wrong. The deeper lesson beyond the question of resurrection is that approaching the word of God with beliefs you want to prove correct will not work in the end. The humility that Jesus calls us to, to put the first last, and the last first, means we put our preconceived ideas last, and set the whole of scripture first. To find the truth, to find the voice of God in scripture, is to stand before it with the courage to accept what it says, especially when it contradicts our assumptions of what is true. It is no sin to discover that you have misunderstood scripture, or searched for confirmation of righteousness. This contradiction leads us to think, to consider a belief from more than one perspective, and that is when we begin to hear the voice of God. We are in a life-long discovery of what God is saying to us individually and as a community in scripture. If we believe in a God who so loves the world, we cannot be afraid of or avoid   listening to God’s guiding words in scripture.