Luke 20: 27-38
Preached by Rev. Dr. Jason Haddox
From T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “Little Gidding”:
“What we call the
beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to
make a beginning.
The end is where we
start from.”
Today we begin the
season of “The Long Advent.” The end of
the year, and the beginning. Purple
vestments on the ministers, bare branches on the altar, and seven (not four,
but seven) candles to mark the progression of time. There is a history behind this “Long Advent”,
and an intentionality to remember—to be re-membered, put back together by—the
hope and promise of the season. We need
more of it, because we are much robbed of it by the time and place in which we
live. Already we hear the strains of Christmas
carols at the store and in the hold music on the phone; we look at our
rapidly-decreasing dayplanners (printed or electronic) and panic at what
remains to be done, before either we leave to visit scattered friends and
family, or they descend upon us.
Time is running out.
We need to
remember. And to be re-membered, brought
back into God, into our right minds. To
begin anew, to look and listen for the voice of God—still, small, easily
overlooked or missed—and yet always speaking to us, whether we will hear or no.Always calling to us
through the distractions and confusions.
Jesus is teaching in the
Temple this morning, and the Sadducees (who say there is no resurrection) come
to him with a distraction, a confusion.
They tell the hypothetical story of a woman, married and widowed seven
times in sequence to seven brothers, who then herself dies without
offspring. “In the Resurrection (nudge,
nudge, wink, wink) whose will she be—for all seven of them had had her?
Social Context: The custom of levirate marriage (from levir, “brother”) was a way of assuring
both the continued legacy and estate of a deceased older brother, and the
protection of a (presumably young) childless widow. Such a practice “…not only continues the line
of the deceased, it also affirms the…widow’s place in the home of her husband’s
family.” (Anchor Bible Dictionary, “Levirate Marriage.”)
Which is all well and
good as far as it goes, but the example is ridiculous. Seven brothers all marry the same woman, and
all die one after another without ever fulfilling the intended goal—that is, to
“raise up children” to the elder brother.
In a time and place where women were valued as wives and mothers and not
much else, this was a problem.
And so the Sadducees,
“who say there is no resurrection”, come asking a question which, in their
worldview, has no possible legitimate answer in the first place. But then, they don’t really want a legitimate
answer. They are there in this scene to
make life difficult for Jesus, and for his followers.
Context: In the Temple, after the triumphal entry,
after the temple tantrum (Luke 19:45-46.)
We are reading it in
November, but in the story arc it’s late in Holy Week.
Jesus (and by extension,
his followers) are being questioned and attacked by a number of opponents,
coming at them, one after the other, in rapid sequence.
The end is upon them,
and they know it. Time is running out.
This absurd case that
the Sadducees put before him provokes a dramatic response from Jesus. Basically he tells them “You are all full of
it if you think that’s how it works.”(Matthew and Mark are much more explicit
about this telling-off.) He doesn’t
disparage marriage as such, but he tells them that “In the resurrection,
everything is changed. None of the
categories that you want to make use of (married, unmarried, childless,
fertile) apply.”
“Those whom God chooses
as worthy of this new world cannot die any more. They are like the angels/they are children of
God, being children of the resurrection.”
(Lit, in Gk: “sons of God/of Resurrection”—which the NRSV makes
gender-neutral, but loses the “sons of God/SON of God” connection.) In other words, the Resurrection from the
dead is Jesus first as the down-payment, then the rest of us as sons (and
daughters) of the Kingdom too.
And this is Luke telling
the story. Luke, who through the words of
John the Baptist all the way back in chapter 3, tells those who think they’ve
got an inside track on God’s favor because of their ancestry: “Do not say to
yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father,’ for I tell you God is able from
these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”
The perceived necessity of “raising up (biological) children” to
preserve the family ancestry and heritage is not required in the household of
God; God can create life even out of stones, even out of the dust of the
ground, even out of death itself.
Remember Genesis 1? God
created…and it was SO GOOD! (So good!)
The categories we’ve
built our lives upon are not binding on God’s grace, God’s favor, God’s
power. Our notions about who is valuable
in a household, in a town, in a community, may not be what God has in mind at
all.
Jesus does not come to
help us be “less dead”; Jesus comes—as the babe of Bethlehem, as the prophet of
Nazareth, as teacher and healer and crucified and risen Lord, and as the Savior
of the World who was, and who is, and who is yet to be—to bring us life,
abundant life. The life of God, in which
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Miriam and Aaron, Peter and Paul, Martha and
Mary, Augustine, Brigid, Francis and Clare, Gwinn and Caroline, Molly, Lloyd,
Rosemary, Mary and North, Genie and Mort, all of them, all of them, still are
held in God’s care and keeping.
“When God raised Jesus
from the dead, God inaugurated a new humanity and initiated the fulfillment of
all things. A conviction writ large in the New Testament is that God’s promised
future has already begun in the death and resurrection of God’s Messiah. So
hope is living today in the certainty that God’s promises will be fulfilled.
Hope is living as though what we believe will happen in the end is as good as
done already.”
The Sadducees did not
believe in a resurrection of the dead.
And therefore they were
very sad, you see.
But the Church did
believe. Does believe. Holds that as central, from which all else
flows.
When we come to the
end—of the calendar, of the year, of the road, of our rope, of our own lives—we
trust that that that end is not the final word.
That there is yet more.
“What we call the
beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to
make a beginning.
The end is where we
start from.”
Happy new year, dear
ones.
Amen.
(Dr. D. Jay Koyle, APLM
website, http://aplm2013.blogspot.ca/2013/11/0-0-1-531-3027-table-song-eighth-day.html, accessed 11/10/13)
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