The Land of Unlikeness

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. Continue reading ‘Sadducees and bad preaching’