Transcription
There’s a little something in the question that gets asked of Jesus that’s just downright not fair. Have you ever had one of those conversations where somebody’s sitting on a question and the question isn’t really something that is supposed to be answered? It’s something that’s supposed to shut down the conversation, shut down the argument. It’s a question that is put to somebody in a political, theological, or whatnot situation that nobody can answer.
And so you throw it out not because you’re genuinely wanting to converse about this, but because you want to win. None of us have ever done that with a conversation, never. It’s okay.
We once in a while do it, maybe with a family member and discussion. And that’s what this is, this question posed to Jesus. It’s supposed to be the unanswerable question that the Sadducees trot out and throw out to the Pharisees.
And the Pharisees are supposed to be flustered. They’re supposed to be angsty because they don’t have an answer to it. And the problem is we look at, often in Scripture, the folks who approach Jesus and ask him questions, the Pharisees, the scribes, the Sadducees, the Sanhedrin, all of them.
We look at them in this monolithic tower and we say, it’s everybody against Jesus. But it’s all of these different sects that are actually arguing and fighting amongst themselves that at any given moment, think of Jesus as their friend and ally, or in the next moment, he is their opponent. And so Jesus has shown the Pharisees up with their question.
And now the Sadducees come up and they’re like, all right, Jesus, here’s our question. And it’s designed to embarrass. It’s designed to fluster.
And it’s designed to win at all costs. Now, as we read this question, it’s less about the question and more about what Jesus does in this moment. Because Jesus very easily could have been like the Pharisees and gotten flustered, gotten angry and said, well, you know, that’s not a fair question to ask.
That’s ridiculous. He could have responded that way, but he’s Jesus. And so he responds in a different way.
He takes this attack question and he accepts it almost. He accepts it and makes it his own. Now, the big point of contention between the Sadducees and Pharisees is over scripture.
Not the first time somebody argued over scripture, and obviously not the last. The Sadducees only regarded the written law in the early Old Testament as the rule of law. The Pharisees took all of the oral tradition law and the prophets and put that together.
So you see some of that contention. And Jesus, as he answers, you can imagine that uptick in the corners of his mouth as he smiles. I never picture Jesus with a downturned face when these questions come.
Because he’s Jesus. And these aren’t contentions to him. These are moments of clarity where he is showing kindness to people.
Now, he makes the opening barrage, if you will, the opening statement where he says, those who live in this age are people of this age. And that speaks entirely to the Sadducees who thought there is no resurrection. So what we have here is what we have.
Live today. Live all for today. But the Sadducees also have some baggage.
Remember how sinners and tax collectors were collaborators often with the Romans? Well, the Sadducees are the collaborators on a different level. They’re the Roman government, if you will, supporting the people, well, supporting Rome in its oppression of the people. And all through it, people are looking at this promise of the Messiah that Jesus is speaking to.
And there’s one group that we just met who would be very upset over Jesus being the Messiah. The Sadducees don’t want a Messiah. They don’t need a Messiah because they want things to be as they are.
Any motion towards a more godly form of living, anything calling back from what they have right now under Rome is something they don’t want. The Messiah is a disruptor to them. He’s someone who comes and challenges authority and the status quo who upsets trade and Rome.
And the reality is what they understand the world to be is different than what we would. And then Jesus points out that his view of the world is different than the Sadducees. Now, again, we’ve heard this refrain before, and we heard it with the kids earlier, the description of what is heaven, what is on this earth.
Because when Jesus speaks, he talks about what we accept and what is. And he uses the terms two ages, the age that is and the age that is to come. And often we think of things that are going to be within the understanding that we’ve had and built up over life.
Now, how many of us looked at phones, cellular phones, when we first got them and thought of it in terms of the phones that hung on our walls, right? We thought of phones in terms of, well, how am I going to get that cord all that way? And then phones moved into more. So how do you describe, how would you describe a cellular phone to somebody in the 1980s? It’s a computer. Well, what was a computer back then? Those big bulky boxes with the big bulky monitor that weighed about a hundred pounds each.
How do you describe these things? Well, really you can’t, because there is no definition that is comparable. And so when God describes heaven, when Christ describes heaven, what is heaven like? Well, everyone tries to understand it within the schema of here, within the now. And guess what? There is one huge thing that is present in the here and now that is not present in heaven that changes everything across the board.
Down here in this life, we have this thing called sin that tarnishes and taints everything around us. It harms human interaction. So all relationships of humans are in some form or fashion tainted by sin.
And we try and say that human interactions are the same up in heaven. No, they’re not. Heaven is so much more.
You take sin out of the equation and you have literally broken the machine. You’ve broken it. It’s not something we can compare because sin is here and sin is not there.
And that alone means that we can’t speak from a point of understanding what and how heaven is. Now, many of us use the idea of a mirror to understand the difference between heaven and there. The mirror, the earth is the reflection, but guess what? That’s more like a funhouse mirror in many ways.
The reality is heaven, as much as we look at the words the kids used to describe heaven, how much better, how much greater, how much more is heaven than our human understanding? So that’s where Jesus begins. That’s where Jesus starts his conversation with that question because that’s where the Sadducees are starting. They’re trying to compare relationships, human experience in the here and now where there is sin and so much awfulness.
And they’re trying to compare it to eternal life, existence with God. You can’t compare those things at all. But then Jesus, after pointing that ridiculousness out, talks about more of a corrective point.
He uses, instead of using the prophet’s arguous point, he meets the Sadducees where they are scripturally. Think about it. He argues and uses Moses as the example.
Moses would have supported the Sadducees’ argument. They would have used Moses. Oh, but he uses Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob also to support his argument.
He’s not just meeting them on a crossroad somewhere and telling them, you have to accept where I’m coming from. He meets them along the road where they are, and he uses their acceptance of what is scripture, their moment. The problem is the Pharisees would have argued from the prophets, but in many ways that’s like trying to argue with my Croatian great aunts in English.
They’ll start switching to Croatian, and then you can’t converse with them, and that’s how they would win an argument because you couldn’t converse with them. And the Sadducees will win the argument with the Pharisees because they’ll say, we don’t accept the prophets, and by doing so they win the argument. But this isn’t about winning.
This is about faithful listening to God, and that’s where the departure here is because the Sadducees seek an argument. They seek a fight, and Jesus takes their argument, and he transforms it. He makes it so that he can meet them on their own ground.
He can talk to them and have them understand, and yes, even accept what he has said. It’s an amazing reference here because not only do we understand how amazing heaven is beyond our understanding in Christ’s teaching, but we also understand the level to which Christ is willing to meet us. If he’s willing to meet the Sadducees on their own ground, and they are approaching from a very contentious avenue, how much more will Christ meet us? Us, the people in his pews, the peoples in his church, his children, his brothers and sisters.
The reality is Jesus takes the round peg and finds the round hole. He doesn’t take a round peg and a bigger hammer and try and get it through the square hole. No, he meets these Sadducees where they are, and he talks to them in a way that they will understand, may not accept his teaching, but at least hear and understand it.
There’s a grace that he extends them, a grace that you might say that they don’t deserve because of their approach, their attacking perspective that they go for. But even Jesus’ opening question, he shows grace and compassion to them. He shows them a level in which he embraces them and is willing to work with them.
He isn’t about winning in this moment. He’s about compassion and teaching. So he doesn’t just give us the concept of heaven being better than this and different.
He doesn’t just teach us in this way how we can engage one another, but he shows us a level of grace even in the face of a personal attack, in the point of contention. He shows love and grace as well as correcting. So brothers and sisters, the challenge for all of us is to listen to Christ.
I know it’s hard. Sometimes he challenges us and asks us to do and be more than we want to be. Sometimes he meets us along the road and challenges us to not meet others where we want them to be, but meet them where they are.
And he asks us in all times and in all moments, even when the chance is coming of attack, to meet it with grace and love. So brothers and sisters, may we meet all moments as Christ did with grace and love, but also with the peace of knowing that when we meet one another where we are, when we accept one another where we are, it is not accepting necessarily what they believe, but conversing in a comfortable language. Brothers and sisters, may we follow where Christ has shown us and accept his instruction.