Luke 20:27-38 is a pronouncement story concerning the resurrection. The source is Mark. The form of the story is rabbinic.[1] The text is in the style of rabbinic debate belonging to the Palestinian community, when Christians were in direct conflict with Pharisees and other groups. The absence of ideas developed in early Christianity lend historical credibility as an incident in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The vigor and thrust of the debate is life-like.
I have never preached from this passage. It would be tempting to leap to the topic of a good marriage. Granted, the design of levirate mirage was to deal with the harsh realities of ancient life. However, it seems to me that its lesson is elsewhere. There may well be no stupid questions. However, there are unserious questions designed to make the other person appear foolish or ignorant. When it comes to questions regarding the Bible and theology, we can make assumptions of what we think of as the biblical view when we have not considered issues from other angles. Jesus handles such questions deftly here. We need to learn from him in both discerning when a question is genuine. If not, we need to learn from Jesus how to respond in a way that make the questioner re-consider whether the assumptions of the question are valid. Another interesting approach is to take up honestly the theme of resurrection. Many people today assume that death has the final word. Too many Christians do not face this fact honestly. Resurrection, if true, is a genuine surprise. We have no hint here of the immortality of the soul. How can we today continue to stand with Jesus in his belief in the resurrection? In reality, many of us as clergy no longer do so. The belief is too much to ask of anyone, is it not? If we were to have a sermon on this passage, we would have to deal with issues like this.
27Some Sadducees (Σαδδουκαῖοι), who were the priestly party in first century Judaism consisting of the leading families of Jerusalem. Sadducees are the opponents because they traditionally opposed the concept of the resurrection. The Greek rendering of the English term "Zadokite," or the descendants of Zadok, David's high priest. In the competition between the priestly houses in ancient Israel, the Zadokites were the decided winners. Jesus' opponents in this story, the Sadducees, are the inheritors of the temple priesthood, the descendants of Aaron whose faction survived the exile and whose traditions dominated the Second Temple period. Scholars believe that they are responsible for the codification and preservation of most of the Old Testament legal material; so, it is not surprising that this group approaches Jesus with what they believe is a flaw in his logic about resurrection. They took their stand with the Pentateuch. Thus, we find the further identification of them as those who say there is no resurrection. They 28 came to him and asked him a question, intending to disparage Jesus as a teacher, saying, {19} "Teacher, Moses wrote for us, offering a free rendering of Deuteronomy 24:5-6, that 'if a man's brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother.' Their argument centers on the legal tradition of levirate marriage, known from Genesis 38, Ruth, and Deuteronomy 25:5-10. The design of this law was to provide a way back into the fabric of family structure for young women left widowed prior to having children. Rather than thrusting them back into the marriage market, through which they might never successfully remarry and thus become more likely to fall into poverty, levirate marriage sought to insure them a place in their new in-laws' family by making them secondary wives to another man in the family, usually their dead husbands' brother. It was a way of providing security for them. 29 Now here were seven brothers; the first married and, when he died, left no children; 30 then the second 31 and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. 32 Finally the woman also died. 33 In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her."
The situation described in the text is like the dilemma posed by some professional athletes whose stellar accomplishments were performed for two or more teams. When inducted into the Hall of Fame, which hat or uniform will he wear? Take Major League Baseball, for example. The following athletes who played for several teams are in baseball’s shrine to excellence at Cooperstown, New York. The number following the name indicates the number of teams for whom they played in their HOF careers. Roberto Alomar, 7; Goose Gossage, 9; Rickey Henderson, 8; Gaylord Perry, 8; and Hoyt Wilhelm, 9. Now, what uniform are they wearing in the Hall of Fame?
The point of the question is to show the absurdity of belief in the resurrection. The extreme example may have its basis on Sarah, one of the leading characters found in the Deuterocanonical book of Tobit: “The wicked demon Asmodeus had killed” Sarah’s first seven husbands before she had any children (Tobit 3:7-9). The loaded question posed to Jesus arises out of an ongoing debate between the Pharisees and the Sadducees over the issue. Jesus takes the side of the Pharisees in assuming that there is a resurrection. In the minds of the Sadducees, it would be impossible for a doctrine of bodily resurrection to exist alongside this law. Marriage unites two people into one kin, one flesh, and although a man might marry more than one woman, a woman can only enter this special bond with one man. So, how can a resurrected woman be "one flesh" after death with seven men, all of whom she was "one flesh" with on earth? This law only makes sense to the Sadducees if the dead cease to exist after death. If the first husband still exists, all the other marriages are adulterous, and why would God ordain a law that produces multiple adulterous marriages in the afterlife? Since there is no clear statement about afterlife in the Torah, but there is a clear statement about levirate marriage, the Sadducees reason that there must not be an afterlife. 34 Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; 35 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. 36 Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. Jesus focuses his answer, however, on the nature of the resurrection, pointing out that the hypothetical widow would have no need for the security promised by levirate marriage once she became a child of the resurrection. Neither would any of her former husbands need to concern themselves with the demands of family responsibility regarding her. Resurrection existence is not like earthly existence. The point Jesus makes is that they have erroneously assumed earthly institutions will continue in the age to come. Thus, Jesus avoids the trap set for him by the question. He argues that angels have no sex and therefore marriage of angels is a pointless issue. 37 And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, how God said to him, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? {27} He is God not of the dead, but of the living; you are quite wrong."[2] The witty reply recalls Jesus' way of responding to hostile queries. They need to listen to Moses, their teacher about resurrection and immortality. The hope of resurrection has its basis upon fellowship with God rather than the immortality of the soul. He uses scripture to affirm the resurrection. Thus, the Sadducees believe they are engaging Jesus in a discussion of whether resurrection from the dead exists. Jesus dismisses the debate out of hand as the simple trick that it is. He uses the question as an opportunity to say more about what the resurrected life will be like. Jesus' point is that while it is clearly true that the dead faithful are alive in God, it is also equally true that their new life has extraordinarily little in common with their mundane lives here on earth. Marriage and the legal wrangling that surrounds it will not be part of the resurrection life that excludes social problems like poverty and bereavement. The resurrected will leave these behind and experience a new type of relationship with each other and with God.
This passage is an important one for both Old and New Testament theology because it highlights the fact that the debate concerning the fate of the human soul after death was still very much alive in Jesus' day. Hebrew anthropology held that a body was alive only if it still had breath and/or blood in it. When God transformed the human being from an inanimate object into a "living being" God did so by breathing the breath, the literal spirit, into the human body. In their minds, soul and body were one being.
Therefore, it is so important to the early church to maintain that God raised the earthly body of Jesus. If his body had remained in the tomb and his followers had claimed that his disembodied soul had departed, this would not have constituted resurrection in the minds of Jewish listeners. Old Testament anthropology maintains that when one dies, one's soul and body, as a unit, decompose and cease to exist unless resurrection occurs through miraculous intervention. Ecclesiastes testifies that he does not believe those who argue that human souls survive after death and ascend to heaven. He argues the opposite, namely, that God reminds us daily that we are no different from the other animals in the created order that return to the dust from which God made them when they die (Ecclesiastes 3:19-21). The consensus seems to be that the dead go to the pit of Sheol from which no one returns. This is not, however, as straightforward as it sounds, for as Jesus points out, the Old Testament speaks of certain special people as if they have remained alive in God after their deaths.
The only Old Testament example of someone whose soul leaves his body after death appears to be Samuel. After going to Sheol to sleep quietly, the Witch of Endor rudely summons Samuel from his grave as a disembodied ghost (I Samuel 28). However, two Old Testament characters who appear not to go to Sheol at all are Enoch (Genesis 5:24) and Elijah (II Kings 2) whom God miraculously transported to heaven. The Old Testament also witnesses to simple resurrections, notably performed by both Elijah and Elisha (I Kings 17; II Kings 4). Elisha's dead bones even serve to resurrect another dead man fortunate enough to be buried with him (II Kings 13:20-21).
However, perhaps because none of these cases come from the Mosaic law and are thus less authoritative, Jesus does not use them to answer the Sadducees. Rather, Jesus argues that when God uses the present tense to describe himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, when speaking to Moses from the burning bush (Exodus 3:15), this means that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are still alive in God's presence. Otherwise, God would have said, "I was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."
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