LK 20:27-40

Laterally Luke…Pentecost + 22…Revised 2019

Many years ago I’m trying to teach this story to a class of 9-10 year olds in a special school for children with learning disabilities. I must have had a learning disability of my own, even to attempt such a thing, but I guess it was in the syllabus! The day is saved - for me & everyone else - when a bright spark puts up his hand & says, "Fr. Brian, that must be why they were called Sadd-u-cees”! We all have a good laugh, & hopefully learn that not to believe in the resurrection may well be a sad thing. Also, that it’s laughable to try to trick Jesus, or God in any of His Persons! 

Not to believe in the Resurrection is sad because it diminishes God, & us, too, in the process. The question these Sadducees pose, based as it is on picking & choosing from Mosaic law & M.E. custom is a trap they end up in themselves! 

What is resurrection, & how does it ‘work’? As Jesus makes clear, YHWH God is always present tense, & always personally present to us in this world as well as to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, & the other souls in theirs. Jesus’ “Before Abraham was, I am!” [JN8:58] is one of the key passages in Scripture. Eternal life springs of God’s very Being, & reaches across all boundaries of time & space.  

Other lessons here include not playing off one bit of Scripture against another for point-scoring.  And, the need to treat people, including the theoretical oft-widowed & now dead woman with respect, rather than as objects. No one of us is theoretical, or an object. Back in the story, we find ‘some of the scholars’ have the grace to score the encounter Jesus: Lots of points v Sadducees: 0! These are probably not Sadducees changing their minds, but Pharisees, who believe in Resurrection, & are as glad to see Sadducees put down, as the latter are to put Jesus down!

We're not likely to solve Resurrection posers for anyone in a sermon (do sermons solve anything?) but we can at least open up the matter of Resurrection & its implications for renewed & expanded understanding of renewed & expanded life in this world & a next. The quality of resurrection life lies in a dimension we can only enjoy when we discover God & are ourselves enlivened.

The common bond between Moses, AB, IS, & Jacob is that they are all called by God to become somebody & to do something. IS may be a kind of ‘marking time’ person in himself, but brings Jacob, Israel, to birth. We should note, too, the role the over-looked wives of these & other men play in God’s unfolding purpose.   

Brian

Afterthought: Trying to put God & Jesus in a strait-jacket, along with the theoretical woman - let’s call her ‘Miriam’ - her theoretical husbands, Moses, the Law, & all the rest, as the Sadducees are trying to do here is to try to contain the Un-containable! Don’t go there!