Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him 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.
This morning, one of my professors related to the class that in his parish the deacon preached this last sunday. The Gospel, some of you may remember, was from Luke and was the story of the Sadducees posing to Jesus a particularly frightening situation re: Levitical law, but an even more perplexing problem to those who hold to bodily resurrection. Apparently this deacon reads in the passage, and especially in Jesus’ response to the Sadducees, an affirmation that we (Christians, I assume) are not of this world, and b/c we are bound to be like angels in heaven, this world and the corporeal matter not. I got a decidedly different message in my parish. Our sermon told us that the Sadducees were “diet evil” and a rather rambunctious crowd, merely interested in asking Jesus dumb questions like the above. Jesus in this sermon’s telling served a little more than a literary device to offset the Sadducees sophomoric logic.
What I find particularly frustrating about both sermons is their dismisiveness to Jesus’ community, that is, the Jewish community, as represented in this passage. Levitical law was far from a mere trifle as the latter sermon suggests. In fact, the Sadducees were rigorous in their protection of the “cannon”. Different from the Pharisees who held to a robust view of oral law, the Sadducees rejected all oral law, holding instead to the 5 written books of the Torah. Their concern about the application of the law in a situation of bodily resurrection very much reflects their canonical commitments and the implications thereof for thinking through issues of the eschaton.
Jesus’ answer on the other hand says something radical not about the supposed ridiculousness of the question, nor about some gnostic rejection of matter and the world. Rather, he gives a radical glipse into resurrected life, the consummation of human nature as it is drawn up into the mystery and drama of the Triune life, where the bride of Christ is made to never die and is fulfilled in and by God’s unending presence. Why neither sermon could make a nod toward this great truth of the Christian tradition is beyond me.
I wonder if they were both really prepared to preach on a difficult - from our 3rd Millennium POV - text? We are today so far from worrying about whether we’ll be with a -particular- loved on in the next life, but are rather stuggling to deal with the very existence of a life in the world to come.
In a way the Sadducees/Pharisees dilemma seems to mirror the difficult situation in Anglicanism. We are always dueling it seeems rather than rejoicing in the promise of the Resurrection.