November 11, 2007 The Rev. James Lee Winter Having just finished an election week, most of us can sympathize with what the Sadducees were trying to do to Jesus. They are not interested in an answer. This is one of those impossible “What if...?” questions designed to trap and discredit rather than gather information. I have here in my hand a list of all those in this department who have ever taken office supplies home from the office... Have you stopped kicking your dog? If you were on a desert island... It was one of my Dad’s pet peeves as a journalist - asking questions that weren’t really questions at all but disguised speeches or “set-ups.” Just look at the usually ignored poor woman in this question. The law of levirate marriage - if your husband died childless, she was supposed to marry his brother to keep all that inheritance and bloodline stuff straight. This poor woman has married seven brothers in a row trying to produce an heir. I think in the resurrection, she surely gets some time off and a lot of sympathy. Of course, it was a trick question! While we often put the Pharisees and Sadducees together, they were sworn enemies except when it came to trying to trip up Jesus. The Pharisees were lay folks who were mostly apolitical and middle class or professional. The Sadducees were the aristocracy - royals and of the priestly caste, mostly collaborators with Rome -they had a lucrative status quo to protect. One of their main disagreements was that the Pharisees believed there would be some kind of afterlife or raising up in the end time, but the Sadducees rejected all such notions and found them offensive. So, this question was meant to discredit the notion of resurrection as ridiculous and Jesus as a teacher. Before going on with this scene, I want to try to say something about the ideas behind it. The Old Testament Hebrews thought of afterlife as a shadowy sleepwalking existence in an underworld not unlike the Hades of Greek and Roman mythology. By New testament times, this was replaced by the idea of resurrection. We moderns often confuse the Greek notion of our souls being immortal even if the body dies just because it is a soul with the Biblical view. The Hebrews believed that the body and soul were inseparable and any eternal life was resurrected life, a gift of God and God’s doing alone. Jesus speaks of a resurrection from death not some sort of release of an immortal soul that has never died. But, there’s a lot that we just can’t know this side of the heavenly kingdom. I, personally, don’t spend a lot of time trying to decipher what eternal life looks like because I believe it has to be something that transcends everything I think I know about it - more than we can ask for or imagine. And that is part of how Jesus answers these Sadducees. Their trick question was based on the mistaken notion that somehow this new life we call heaven was bound by the same limitations we have now. He uses scripture, which they regularly misused to suit their own purposes, to prove that there is life after death. God told Moses he was God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob - long dead and buried - and God is God of the living not of the dead. After this, some of the Sadducees had the grace to admit that he was the teacher and they did not try to best him anymore. One of the commentaries on this lesson described the Sadducees as “majoring in minors.” It’s a vocational hazard for the religious. We can get so focused and distracted by minor matters that we miss the boat. Everyone has heard of the medieval argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pen. It has become a cliche for “majoring in minors.” We still do it. There are lots of controversial matters facing most churches, from denominations to local parishes, from the authority of the church to whether or not to paint the ceiling and what color, and not just in our own Anglican tradition. Too often in pursuing the controversial, we ignore some of the basics. Christianity is losing ground as a real force, as a percentage of the world’s population. The percentage of folks in America who actually participate in a church is dropping especially among younger folks, there are hungry in a land where food is abundant and inexpensive relative to income in a way that the Pilgrims at that first Thanksgiving would have considered an impossibility. The Sadducees were worried about maintaining their status as the town big shots when Jesus was talking about the kingdom of God come near. We can debate about whether we say “thee” or “you” while God in Christ is calling us to be, to live as disciples. The church as the body of Christ is supposed to be the community that asks the questions that matter and supports one another in seeking the genuinely meaningful life. The emphasis is on community and a particular journey in a specific direction. We shouldn’t confuse that with terminal grimness. Grim disciples make sour wine. But I do worry sometimes that we are like the Sadducees too often in our religious approach. God is God indeed of the living. So, we are to become truly alive, major in the majors, alive in Christ ... to know that “at the last ... he will raise me up, then in my flesh I shall see God. I myself shall see, and my eyes behold him who is my friend and not a stranger.” That’s not just about resurrected life in the bye and bye, it’s about a way of life now.