Untrapped

Jesus walked into a lot of traps.  Almost everywhere he went, he met people who wanted to trip him up.  Most of them were members of religious parties who resented his ministry to folks on the margins of society: sinners, tax collectors, beggars, people of low social status – the kind of people most of us like to avoid, too. 

Jesus’ popularity with these marginalized people gave high muckety-mucks the cold sweats.   So they did their best to discredit him – to catch him out in a lie or inconsistency – or even better, to get him to commit himself to one side or the other of a raging controversy. In today’s reading from Luke, it’s the Sadducees who have laid the trap.

"Teacher, you know the law of Moses. The law says, if a man dies, his brother has to marry his widow.  Suppose there are seven brothers.  The first one dies, and brother number two marries his widow.  Then number two dies and number three marries her.  Then number three dies and it’s number four’s turn, right on down the line.  In the resurrection, Teacher, whose wife will she be?"

It’s a trap. Jesus knows that, and so does everyone else. 

The Sadducees were a particular party within Judaism, composed mostly of urban aristocrats who considered themselves theological conservatives.  They held that if an idea can’t be found the written law, it’s not worth worrying about.  They rejected the vast body of oral rabbinic tradition that had accumulated over the centuries.  New-fangled notions about angels and resurrection did not appear in their theological lexicon.  Today, I suppose, we’d call them "fundamentalists," but that’s a little misleading.  Let’s just say that their motto was, "If it was good enough for Moses, it’s good enough for us."

The Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection.  They believed that when you die, you’re dead.  End of story.  No heaven.  No hell.  No in between.  This is the only life we get,  so we’d better make the best of it.  God rewards us in this life for the good choices we make and punishes us for the bad choices.  It follows, then, that the well-to-do are prosperous because they have chosen well, and the poor are poor because they deserve it.

Not a very imaginative theology, I grant you, but it worked for the Sadducees.  Nothing succeeds like success, and nothing is more comforting to the well-off than the notion that their prosperity is God’s reward.

You can see why the Sadducees opposed the idea of the resurrection of the dead.  It didn’t fit into their neatly-apportioned universe.  It opened up possibilities they didn’t want to think about, and gave God options they didn’t like to ponder.

So the Sadducees scoffed at the idea, popular amongst their rivals, the Pharisees, that there is more to this life than meets the eye.  The Pharisees, we often forget, were the progressive party.  They believed in the resurrection of dead, and the Sadducees were quite happy to fight with the Pharisees until Jesus came along and provided the two parties a common enemy.  Jesus was the prophet both the Sadducees and the Pharisees loved to hate.

          It’s obvious, then, that the Sadducees don’t tell Jesus this yarn about the seven dead brothers in order to learn more about the resurrection.  They don’t believe in the resurrection.  They don’t want their horizons  broadened or their certainties challenged. They put this question to Jesus in order to humiliate and discredit him.  It’s a trap.  Everybody knows it’s a trap, and Jesus walks into it like a lamb to the slaughter.

          I imagine a long and pregnant pause.   The clamor in the temple precinct stops.  The Pharisees lick their lips and the Sadducees poke each other in the ribs.  The crowd is all ears.

          You don’t get it, do you? Jesus says in effect.  Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, but God has something new in mind.  In the resurrection from the dead, people neither marry or are given in marriage.  They’re like angels and children of God, being children of the resurrection.

           Then, in good rabbinic fashion, Jesus delivers a brief midrash on God’s word to Moses at the burning bush.  God didn’t tell Moses, "I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."  He told Moses, "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," implying that even the patriarchs of old are alive to God.

          "Now he is the God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."

          A brilliant stroke, that – quoting Moses to Sadducees.  It caught them in their own Mosaic trap. Wouldn’t you like to have seen their faces?  I see them slinking off into the crowd like a bunch of whipped puppies, to lick their wounds and come up with a better strategy.

          I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling a bit Sadduceean the past few weeks.  Out of options. Low on imagination. Stuck in this age. Trapped.

          On the national front, it feels to me as though the whole country is turning inward, closing in upon itself. Fear has replaced optimism in the quintessential American persona, and it is driving us to act out of character.

        Our president speaks of the rule of law, but exempts himself from following the law by attaching "signing statements" to his signature. The nominee for Attorney General can’t bring himself to say out loud that waterboarding is torture, out of fear that he might have to prosecute Americans for torturing people in our own secret prisons. A dictator in Pakistan shuts down the courts and suspends his country’s democratic constitution, and we dare not so much as slap him on the wrist, because he’s our ally in the "war" on terror.

        Trapped.

        The most overtly Christian administration in recent memory can’t bring itself to admit that the war in Iraq was a terrible mistake – that whatever good it might have accomplished for a short time has been more than erased by the harm it is causing in the long run.

        A president who invoked the imagery of good versus evil to launch a war cannot repent of the evil that same war is causing day after day, year after year. Now, "good" and "evil" are Christian categories, but so is "repentance." Christianity without repentance is just another form of idolatry.

        Trapped.

        Closer to home, many in our church family are lamenting the fact that we probably won’t manage to add an associate minister next year. I’m the worst. I catch myself moping around like a guy who just learned that the tax refund check he’s already cashed was a mistake, and he’ll have to give the money back. Back to the old budget, the old patterns, the old ways of doing things.

        Such a Sadducee I am! I so easily forget that God is the God of the living.

        Resurrection is a way of speaking about something radically new, something Sadducees can’t envision.  Resurrection is life with the living God – a miracle that cannot be squeezed into the tired old categories of the present age. 

          You don’t have to be a card-carrying Sadducee to believe that this life is all there is, that things will never change, that God has left us to stew in our own juice.  The Sadducees lived, as Jesus says, only in "this age." 

To be a Sadducee is to fall into the trap of giving up on God.  For us Sadducees, the very best God can do is give out smiley faces for good behavior and frowning faces for bad.  Beyond that, God’s hands are tied.

          Jesus presents a different kind of God, a God who cannot be pinned down or pigeon-holed, a God of the living, not the dead.  Jesus speaks for a God who is not satisfied with the present age, a God who is doing something new. 

        The gospel that draws us here this morning proclaims that Jesus is more than the spokesperson for that God.  Jesus is that God made flesh.  Jesus, who died, is risen.  The living God is present in the living Christ.   

          The Apostle Paul put it this way: "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.  But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died." (I Cor. 15:19-20).

          Paul went even further.  The church, he said, is the body of the risen Christ, the living community of the living God.  Fallible and feeble as we often are, you and I are nevertheless God’s new creation, God’s window to the new age. We are the living body of the living Christ.  Everything follows from that.

          We can thank the Sadducees this morning for providing this Easter lens for viewing the present state of the church and the world.  Without it we might have fallen into the worse trap of all – the trap of thinking that God is finished with us. 

          God hasn’t finished.  God is just beginning.  Jesus Christ is alive, and the future belongs to him.