After Life
Luke 20:27-38
A few weeks ago I started the sermon by referencing the movie Titanic, which was released in 1997. Now I’m going to hit you with another 90’s movie reference, although one a bit more obscure—Reality Bites. What The Graduate was to the Baby Boom generation, Reality Bites was to Generation X, my generation. Released in 1994, the year after I graduated from college, Reality Bites tells the story of a group of four friends, all of whom are recent college graduates struggling to make their way in the world.
The plot focuses upon two of the friends—Lelaina, an aspiring filmmaker played by Winona Ryder (my generation’s Audrey Hepburn), and Troy, a philosophy-reading, acoustic guitar-playing slacker played by Ethan Hawke. In one memorable scene, after Lelaina is fired from her job, she goes on a series of fruitless job interviews. In one, she attempts to persuade a newspaper editor that her background in film makes her well suited for print reporting. The interviewer is unconvinced, but as she escorts Leilana to the elevator, she gives her one last chance. She asks her to define the word “irony.”
“Irony. Huh? Irony. It’s a noun. It’s kind of ironic.”
With the elevator doors about to close on her, Lelaina stumbles through an incoherent answer before exclaiming, “I know it when I see it!”
This is how I feel when I’m asked to describe the afterlife. First, there’s an awkward pause as my brain scrambles to come up with a relevant Bible verse or a clever theological quotation, followed by a few seconds of stammering. “Afterlife. Well, uh, it’s a noun. It refers to eternity.” Finally, as the imaginary elevator doors are about to close on me, I blurt out, “I’ll know it when I see it!”
Truth is, there’s not much I, or anyone else, for that matter, can say with any degree of confidence about what awaits us after we die. I’d be much more comfortable and confident talking about something that I’ve studied and acquired some knowledge about, like the unique features of each Gospel or the literary and theological brilliance of the book of Job. But the afterlife? That’s well above my pay grade.
Therefore I refer you to someone with much deeper knowledge of the subject than I…Jesus. As we meet him in today’s reading from Luke 20, Jesus has at last arrived in Jerusalem where events will soon climax with his crucifixion. Jesus has come all the way from his home in rural Galilee to the holy city, the center of power in Judea—both Jewish religious power and Roman civil and military power.
The religious powers in the city are not monolithic. There are several rival groups vying for supremacy: the chief priests who oversee the temple, the scribes and Pharisees who who interpret the Law of Moses, and this other group that we encounter in today’s reading, the Sadducees. Not a lot is known about the Sadducees. They don’t appear in the Gospels nearly as much as the other groups. In fact, this passage is the one and only time that Luke even mentions them.
The Sadducees appear to have been based in Jerusalem, and like the priests, their power base seems to have been the temple. A Jewish historian of the first century named Josephus describes them as religious elites whose appeal lay solely with the wealthy. They are intellectual purists, in that they accept as valid only the first five books of the Bible, i.e., the books attributed to Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. They reject all the other books of the Hebrew Bible—prophetic books like Isaiah and Ezekiel, historical books like Kings, and even the Psalms.
The defining characteristic of the Sadducees, as Luke points out in verse 27, is that they don’t believe in resurrection. According to them, the idea of resurrection is not found anywhere in the Law of Moses—those first five books of Scripture. It’s a later add-on and therefore ought to be rejected. So when they hear that this country bumpkin from Nazareth in Galilee has come on to their turf preaching the resurrection of the dead, they can hardly wait to make a fool of him.
They come to him with a question that is designed to make the whole concept of resurrection look ridiculous and at the same time embarrass Jesus. From their perspective, it’s win/win. Jesus either reaches for an answer that is not found in Scripture or, even better, he can’t answer the question at all.
Let me preface the Sadducees’ question by noting that according to the Law of Moses, when a woman’s husband died and there was no son, it was the obligation of the man’s brother to marry her. And any son from that marriage would be named for the brother who died, so that his name might live on. The concept seems strange and archaic to us, rightly so, but it served two purposes. For the man who died it ensured his legacy, and at the same time it offered financial and physical security for the widow, because a widow on her own without a son was extremely vulnerable.
The Sadducees corner Jesus in the temple and ask him to answer a theological question. They preface their question by citing the passage from Deuteronomy that I just mentioned. “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.” Sounds reasonable so far.
They then present to him a situation in which there are seven brothers. The oldest of the brothers marries a woman but sadly dies before the marriage produces any children. How tragic! But then the second brother fulfills his duty and marries his brother’s widow. However, he too dies before the couple have any children. And so the third brother steps up to the plate. Alas, he too swings and misses and is ejected from the game by an untimely death.
By the time the fourth brother is called into action you’d think that the remaining brothers might notice the pattern and therefore change their last name or convert to another religion. But they don’t. They remain faithful to their familial obligation and to the Law of Moses. And so the pattern continues, from the fourth, to the fifth, to the sixth, and, yes, even to the seventh and youngest brother. Seven up, seven down.
Now, put aside the fact that this woman seems to be something of a black widow. Her husbands last about as long as Spinal Tap’s drummers. The scenario is meant to sound preposterous. The Sadducees are trying to show that, from their perspective, the concept of life after death is not only unbiblical but inherently ridiculous.
And now that they’ve baited the trap, they invite Jesus to walk into it. Their hypothetical scenario concludes with the widow herself dying. They then ask, “In the resurrection, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”
You can imagine the Sadducees casting knowing glances at each other.
“Aha! We’ve got him!’ they’re thinking. “Let’s see him answer his way out of that one!”
Now, if it were you or me…. No, I don’t want to speak for you. If it were me, I would be tempted to say something like, “You fools! Allow me to show you how mistaken you are. You think the Scriptures don’t speak of the afterlife, but actually….”
Jesus, of course, is above that sort of pettiness. He’s actually quite restrained, even pastoral, with the Sadducees, viewing them not as opponents to be defeated but as fellow travelers, as children of God, which is to say people who need to hear the good news that in matters of life and death, death does not have the last word.
We believe in resurrection, and there is nothing natural about resurrection.
“Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage,” he begins, “but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.” The Sadducees’ question, “In the resurrection, whose wife will the woman be?”, shows that their idea of the afterlife is pretty much just this life but longer. They’re presupposing that the same categories that apply to this life—marriage, for instance—apply to the life to come.
But Jesus draws a distinction between this age and the age of resurrection. They are as different as night is from day. In this age we are subject to time. Seasons change. Leaves turn color and then fall to the ground. The hair on our heads turns gray, then white. Memories fade. Hearts eventually stop beating. But in the resurrection no one is subject to time because death is no more. Death has been defeated.
We are brushing up here against the limits of human language and reason. If you really try to contemplate eternity, it will make you dizzy. It is impossible for us who exist within the confines of time—the clock hands inexorably turning round and round—to fully grasp what it means to be limited from the tyranny of time. It is impossible for us who occupy this earth for eight or nine decades, if we’re so blessed, to fully grasp what it means for death to be in the rear view mirror—not creeping up upon us but fading from view as we drive on toward a limitless horizon.
“Indeed, they cannot die anymore,” Jesus says of those who live in the power of the resurrection, “because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.” They cannot die anymore. That right there tells us that the resurrection is not the continuation of the same old same old. It is something entirely different, entirely new. Death no longer has any weight, any meaning, any power.
The ancient Greeks believed in the immortality of the soul, meaning that when you die the soul—the essence of the self—lives on free from the body. Think of all those cartoons you’ve seen of the spirit leaving the body and floating toward heaven. It’s a kind of organic process like photosynthesis. It’s innate. It’s natural. It’s what happens when we die.
What I’m about to say I cannot stress enough. That familiar image of the soul leaving the body behind in death and drifting ever so gently skyward…that’s not resurrection. As Christians, we don’t believe in the immortality of the soul. We don’t believe in a natural process by which we die and our souls automatically rise from our bodies like morning fog evaporating into the sunlight. We believe in resurrection, and there is nothing natural about resurrection. Resurrection means you’re dead. You’ve fallen and you can’t get up. You have no power of your own to rise again. You must be raised by one who himself was raised.
Jesus did not rise from the dead like rising from an afternoon nap. In his humanity he did not possess an inherent immortality. He gave that up to become one of us. As we say in the affirmation of faith each week, “He did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself.” He emptied himself of his divinity and thereby became subject to death, just as we are. And because “he humbled himself and was obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross, therefore God also highly exalted him.” Which is to say, God raised him from the dead.
And God will do the same for all who belong to Christ Jesus. “For if we are united with him in a death like his,” Paul writes in Romans, “we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5). And that, I believe, is the best answer that I or anyone else can give in response to the question “What happens when we die?” What happens? We will be united with our risen Savior Jesus Christ. Not for today or tomorrow, or until next Thursday or for 1,000 years. Those words, like all words pertaining to time, will no longer have any meaning in the age to come. We will be in the presence of Jesus for an eternal “now.” In the presence of the one who lived for us, who died for us, who was raised for us, and who loves us eternally.