Luke 20:27-40
27 Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. 28 “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. 30 The second 31 and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. 32 Finally, the woman died too. 33 Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”
34 Jesus replied, “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. 35 But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, 36 and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection. 37 But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ 38 He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”
39 Some of the teachers of the law responded, “Well said, teacher!” 40 And no one dared to ask him any more questions.
A pastor friend of mine recently share a story from his ministry. There was a man whose wife passed away, and he eventually remarried a woman a few years younger than he was. A few years later this man also passed away, leaving his second wife to mourn his passing.
As is sometimes the practice, various members of the family were given the opportunity to share a little story, memory, or thought about the dearly departed at the funeral. The man’s daughter shared a touching story, and ended by saying, “Dad, we miss you, but I know that you are up in heaven now and reunited with mom.”
A few days after the service, the second wife approached my friend and asked, “If my husband has been reunited with his first wife, does that mean that I’ll be alone in heaven?”
How would you answer her question? Would you answer her by quoting our text for today, that we will neither marry or be given in marriage in heaven? Or maybe you have some other insight that I don’t, because I don’t know the answer. Now I don’t think she or anyone else will be alone in heaven, but whose husband will this man be?
Ultimately, I don’t think that today’s scripture was meant to speak to a situation like my friend described. What I want to do today is to look at some historical background for this passage, consider the context in which Jesus was speaking, and show that while this passage isn’t speaking about which wife or husband is whose in heaven, it speaks about something beautiful in a different way.
When we think about marriage throughout the history of humanity, we soon realize that our concept of marriage is only a relatively new development. In the United States, two people meet, date for a bit, fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Sure, there are people who marry for money or social status. But our main reason for getting married in the United States is because we love someone and want to spend the rest of our lives with them.
When Jesus was walking around the earth, his understanding of marriage would have been quite different. First, I should remind everyone that Jesus and the Apostle Paul were single. This isn’t a sermon championing marriage; our leader was single, and so was one of his most prominent apostles. But in biblical days marriage had two primary purposes: keeping women out of poverty, and providing a legitimate heir to the husband’s property.
Keep in mind that this was a very patriarchal society. Women did not work outside the house, as there were very few jobs available to them. That is why we find so many calls to care for the widows in the Old Testament. If they could not find work, their options were quite limited. Often they had to beg or rely on the hospitality of others. This is why polygamy was encouraged in some cases. The average life expectancy of men in Jesus’s day was between 35-40 years. That number is skewed a bit because so many children died of what are now preventable diseases. The high death rate of men was one reason why polygamous marriages were permitted, allowing a man to provide for more than one woman in a society where she could not provide for herself, and there tended to be more women than men.
The family lineage is a huge issue in the Bible. Deuteronomy 25:5-10 describes what we sometimes call the “Levirate Marriage” tradition. Levir is a Latin word, which means “husband’s brother.” Verses 5-6 tell us, “If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband’s brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her. The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel.”
Let’s unpack this a bit. It was very uncommon for a woman to own property in the Old Testament. So in a Levirate Marriage, the brother who married the widow of his brother would then acquire all the land owned by the deceased brother. If the second brother was able to have a male child with his deceased brother’s wife, their son would be named after the deceased brother, and he would be considered the son of the deceased brother and his actual mother. When that brother would die, the son that he had with his brother’s wife would inherit the first brother’s property. That child would then be able to provide for his mother, again, because in this society, she could not provide for herself.
I know that was confusing, but keep in mind that the reasoning behind the levirate marriage was to pass on the brother’s property, to establish a lineage, and to provide for the widow. Now, just for fun, we can read the next few verses, which describe what is to be done if the next brother refuses to marry his sister-in-law. This is called the “halitzah” in Hebrew, and it is found in verses 7-10: “However, if a man does not want to marry his brother’s wife, she shall go to the elders at the town gate and say, ‘My husband’s brother refuses to carry on his brother’s name in Israel. He will not fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to me.’… His brother’s widow shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, take off one of his sandals, spit in his face and say, ‘This is what is done to the man who will not build up his brother’s family line.’ That man’s line shall be known in Israel as The Family of the Unsandaled.”
We laugh because that really seems like a strange practice. But again, we cannot forget that this woman now found herself without a source of income, without a roof over her head, and without her basic needs being met. The levirate marriage, and marriage in general, were meant in part to care for the widows left behind after the death of a husband. This was an issue of caring for the needy. This was an issue of justice.
Let’s bring this background information to our text for this morning where we meet a group known as the Sadducees. An important bit of information on the Sadducees is that they were the caretakers of the Temple. They oversaw the sacrificial system. And what happened in Luke 19, just before our text for today? Jesus comes into the Temple, overturns the moneychangers’ tables, drives out the animals, and says, “You have turned my father’s house into a den of thieves.” The Sadducees took that personally. And they were probably getting rich off those sales.
The Sadducees were a lot like the Pharisees in that they were all looking to discredit Jesus. This interaction between Jesus and the Sadducees was always meant to be a trap. The Sadducees weren’t trying to learn something from Jesus, they were trying to show him how silly the concept of resurrection is, and do so in front of his followers. But the Sadducees and Pharisees differed in a few ways. Luke makes sure to remind us that the Sadducees didn’t actually believe in the resurrection.
The Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection because they only saw the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, as authoritative for the Hebrew faith. So they start their confrontation with Jesus by saying, “‘Teacher,’ they said, ‘Moses wrote…’” Moses, the author of the Torah, is their trump card. You’ve been talking about all this stuff, but Moses says…
“Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.” We will come back to this shortly. Then the Sadducees launch into a weird, hypothetical situation based on the Levirate tradition, where seven brothers all marry the same woman. Each brother dies before the wife, which makes me think…that she’s not a good cook. Then they ask the question, Whose wife will she be at this so-called resurrection?
Jesus essentially tells the Sadducees that they are missing the point. They don’t understand the nature of marriage and why it will not be relevant at the resurrection. But again, this was never about marriage. This was about the resurrection. So Jesus tries to show them why the resurrection isn’t such a far-off concept.
In verse 37, Jesus says, “But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’”
Jesus seems to be saying, “Look, Moses doesn’t refer to God as the God who Abraham worshipped, the God Isaac worshipped, or the God Jacob worshipped. No, Moses called him the God of these men. Not past, but present tense.”
Seems like a weak argument to me. Why didn’t Jesus quote Daniel 12:1b-2, which says, “But at that time your people—everyone whose name is found written in the book—will be delivered. Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.” That seems like a much stronger case for the resurrection than the fact that Moses used the present tense instead of the past.
Jesus didn’t appeal to the book of Daniel, because Daniel is not a part of the Torah, and therefore the Sadducees didn’t see it as authoritative. It is like making an argument with a Democrat by saying, “But I saw of Fox News…” or with a Republican by saying, “But Nancy Pelosi said…” A Democrat doesn’t trust Fox News, and a Republican doesn’t trust Nancy Pelosi. That’s why Jesus says, “You want to talk about Moses. I’ll talk to you about Moses. Here’s what Moses had to say…”
This text ends with a strange twist. We are told that the teachers of the law commend Jesus, telling him, “Well said, teacher!” These teachers of the law have been against Jesus all along, but at least he helped them with those pesky Sadducees.
Let’s summarize all that has happened here before we look at some practical applications. We have these two reasons for marriage in the biblical era: continuing one’s lineage and an issue of justice, caring for women, especially widows. But neither of these issues is even relevant because at the resurrection, there will be no need to have an heir to continue your lineage. You will continue your lineage! There will be no death. And men will not have to provide for women. God will provide all we need, and there will be no shortage. And you sure won’t need some man to get it for you. At the resurrection, there will be perfect equality and perfect justice.
Now we can get practical. One of the things that is lost when you take a perspective like the Sadducees, that there is no resurrection, is the hope for ultimate justice. Without resurrection, there is no hope for the world to be set right. The best you can hope for is to make this world a bit better; we’ve been trying to make it right for thousands of years, and in many ways, we’ve failed miserably.
We live in a world where cancer exists, and where people die way too soon. We live in a world where millions of Jews were killed in the Holocaust, where 70% of the Tutsis were wiped out in Rwanda, and where today thousands of Rohingya are displaced from their homes in Myanmar. Without resurrection, we lose hope for a restored body for those who pass away at a young age. Without resurrection, we lose hope for justice for the victims of genocide. Without resurrection, death wins. Without resurrection, pain is the victor. Without resurrection, despair is the only reasonable attitude.
In a way, those who do not believe in the resurrection may do a better job working for justice here on earth if they believe this is all there is. You have probably heard the saying, “Don’t be so heavenly minded that you’re of no earthly good.”
I think we need to be somewhere in the middle as Christians. We need to be somewhere between sitting back and doing nothing because God is going to take care of it all, and being filled with despair because of the injustices of this world. I hold out hope that one day God will make all things right, but I also know that we are also called to help make this world as close to that perfection as possible. That’s why we have the line in the Lord’s Prayer, where Jesus invites his disciples to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Marriage, particularly the Levirate Marriage, was meant to be a step toward justice. As patriarchal as it sounds, these widows were cared for by their husband’s brother and then their offspring. This is what Jesus speaks of when he talks about caring for the “least of these.”
While today women are able to provide for their selves, and some of them make more money than their male counterparts, there is still a long way to go for women to be treated as equals in this country and around the world. The fact that there are still people who don’t have enough to eat as we approach the third decade of the 21st century is rather depressing. Yes, there will be a time when there is no hunger, but our job isn’t to sit back and wait for the resurrection when all will be made right. No, that’s why we work at the Valley Mission and volunteer at the Relief Sale, giving these people a taste of resurrection. We long for the day when genocide will only be something we only read about in the history books, but we also seek to teach the world that all life is valuable, as all people are created in the image of God. We do not sit back and wait on resurrection. We embody resurrection today.
So to the dear old lady who asked my friend, “If my husband has been reunited with his first wife, whose husband will he be when we all get to heaven?” I simply will say, I don’t know. But what I do know is that God has promised his followers the gift of resurrection. And God has promised to make all things new. Though these questions aren’t unimportant, I’m going to choose to trust that all will be well.
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