We don’t know much about most things. We don’t know how the brain works. We don’t know how gravity works. We don’t know how life began, or what dark energy is.
We are like characters in the 1950s song by Sam Cooke, where the protagonist sings: Don't know much about history. Don't know much biology. Don't know much about a science book. But, I do know, he says, that I love you, and I know that you love me too. That pretty much sums up the Gospel reading today from Luke. That is how it is with God and us.
The Sadducees attempt in this passage to trap Jesus into acknowledging the absurdity of the resurrection. The Sadducees were competitors with the Pharisees for power and control of the theological agenda at the end of the first century. The Sadducees held that there was no resurrection of the dead. They accepted as authoritative only the first five books of the Bible—the story from Adam through Moses—and in those books they found no evidence of resurrection.
The Pharisees, in contrast, argued that all of scripture, including the prophets and the psalms, revealed God’s truth. And that the Bible therefore supported the notion of resurrection. Apostle Paul was a Pharisee, and it is not a coincidence that so did the newly emerging Christian community formed largely by Paul. The Pharisees (and the Christians) suspected that the Sadducees, even though Jews like themselves, were not really Jewish (much as some Christians today deny that others are Christians, based on some doctrine that they do or do not hold).
The Sadducees felt that God operated within the current world and within its limits. The promises God made to each of us were promises made to living human beings. They were godly and real, but they did not extend beyond life, past death. The covenant that Moses brought from Sinai was not secular, but it was about this world.
This was a difficult position to hold by the time Luke was compiling his Gospel. The Romans by then had destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and it was clear that the power that held dominion over Palestine then and there was Rome. Many many Jews had suffered and died, and the survivors wondered what meaning the covenant had after the destruction of the center of religious and political life.
The notion of resurrection from the dead was thus appealing: God’s promise continued past death and therefore could be trusted eventually (even if not presently.) God did not mean for the Romans to have the last word. In one sense the position of the Sadducees was one that, from the view of the Pharisees and of Jesus, lacked imagination. God was doing a new thing here, or perhaps better to say God was making a new announcement about an eternal thing.
This was not just whistling in the dark, or extracting good out of a bad deal. The Pharisees thought the Sadducees were settling for too little. The Pharisees expected more from God.
Though our claims about resurrection usually seem to be statements about our own nature (what is death? what happens to us after death? how will it be for us and others? what do we hope for?), the discussion that Jesus has with the Sadducees here is more about the nature of God. Can God be trusted? Is God’s power over the universe limited? What is God’s reach and scope?
The words “resurrection” and “eternal life” and “heaven” are not synonymous (that would be a good topic for Bible study), but they cover similar ground. What the Sadducees want to know (or want to argue against) is whether all things end with death and if not, what happens next, regardless of what we call it.
We often think of heaven as some place, either carved out of this world, or existing above and beyond it. “When I get to heaven, going to put on my shoes, going to walk all over God’s heaven.” But the details elude us as much as they fascinate us. Is heaven the way Dante imagined it? Or is it like things here in Cambridge, only much better? Will we see people there that we have loved and lost? Will we be like ourselves? How old will we be (what age would you pick)? Will we be stripped of our diseases, quirks, and weirdnesses that in some ways define us?
And questions broader but just as unanswerable: Do we go to heaven right after death, and if not, what happens in the in-between time? Is heaven just for people? How about animals? How about creatures from other planets in the universe? Is it going to be boring? Is it necessarily pleasant? About these things the Bible, our source, is silent.
What Jesus seems to be saying to the Sadducees (and to all who overhear his conversation) is that heaven—“in the resurrection” rather—is not like any of this. You Sadducees, even you who do not believe in it, he says, are asking the wrong questions. Heaven, eternal life, resurrection of the body; it is not like this, not very much like things you know about. Not about marriage or brothers or laws of property and power. What happens after death is not a continuation of what happens here, only forever. Thank God for that, for we do suffer in this world. But we cannot say that it is like that except nicer and cleaner. Heaven is not a place that recaptures or recovers the past.
But neither is it nothing, as the Sadducees claim. We learn here, as they do, that there is death and that there is something more. Death’s catchment area is this world. Death is the end of many things, but it is not the end of everything. What happens after that is certain but unknown.
And different. It is not what you think. Assumptions we hold become meaningless. Systems of power become powerless. Relationships change. And what we experience in our lives here is not all that God has in mind for us.
Jesus is not giving us this story in Luke to tell us how resurrection works. Not to explain resurrection. The Bible is a book about God and God’s relationship with us. This story is not about the mechanics of the cosmos, but about God. To God, all things are living, Jesus says. Human life may not be endless, but God’s love for humans is.
We know just a little about God. Things that are revealed to us in scripture and in our living. But our job, if you want to call that, our destiny, our hope, is not to know about God. We do not have to know how God works. We just have to know God. To know God and to love God and be loved by God.
Or as Sam Cooke might put it: Don’t know much about divinity, don’t know much about theology, but I do know that God loves me.
In the now and in the later, Jesus tells us that we are alive to God. That is how it is with God and us.
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