By Nanette Sawyer
Gospel Reading: Luke 20:27-38
For Sunday, November 10, 2013: Year C—Lectionary 32
Recently coming off of All Saints Day, I’ve been thinking about how all the people I love will someday die. It could be sooner or later, but it will happen. It’s sobering and painful (as well as an honor) to sit with others who have lost or are losing their loved ones already.
I’ve been taught that talking about death is morbid. I think our culture teaches this. We’re supposed to be the happy, clappy culture that functions like bouncy, bouncy Tigger and never like the old classic Winnie the Pooh who was quiet and contemplative (albeit a bit fluff-brained). But death is a reality we all face. And they faced it in Jesus’s day too.
Snarky Talk about Resurrection
The Sadducees were being snarky, for sure. They weren’t talking about their own deaths or the death of their loved ones. They were trying to trip Jesus up in the ridiculous nature of the scenario they spun. If a woman is married 7 times in this world, who will she belong to in the next world when all the resurrected people get back together again?
The gospel according to Luke was written a couple of decades after Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, where Paul also takes up the issue of bodily resurrection. But Paul was dealing with the real fears present in the early church as followers of Jesus saw their loved ones die before the second coming of Christ. How could the bodies they knew were decaying be resurrected? Would the already-dead be left behind when Jesus came to bring believers into the new kingdom? It was a sincere question, and not a snarky word-trap.
What’s a Body to Do?
In my reading, Paul says that the resurrection will not be physical. In 1 Cor 15 Paul says “It’s the same with the resurrection of the dead: a rotting body is put into the ground, but what is raised won’t ever decay…It’s a physical body when it’s put into the ground, but it’s raised as a spiritual body.” (vs 42, 44, Common English Bible) (The NRSV uses “perishable” to talk about the “rotting” in the Common English Bible.)
Paul says bodies won’t be the same, and I think that runs parallel to Jesus saying relationships won’t be the same. Although Jesus is answering the snarky Sadducees, he is also addressing everyone within earshot, and some of them have very real concerns about the nature of resurrection. What will it be like after we die?
To Whom do we Belong?
Levirate marriage, as the Sadducees were describing, existed for the purpose of ensuring children to men in the patrilineal system. If we give the benefit of a doubt, we could consider that levirate marriage protected women by giving them a household to belong to when their husbands died.
But if everyone is a child of God, then issues of lineage no longer apply. Everyone has a “name” in the family of God—they are children of the resurrection, not children of men. Even women have a household to belong to, the household of God, and they no longer need marriage to ensure that.
Marriage is, of course, a huge issue in our contemporary society too. Who gets to marry whom, and what does it mean? The Sadducees asked their question based on the law, the books of Moses, and Jesus gave an answer rooted in the same text. They talked about women belonging to men, and Jesus talked about people belonging to God.
The Hardest Question
In today’s society, marriage is less about lineage and more about belonging. Can this text teach us anything about marriage today?
How do you read?
Nanette Sawyer is the founding pastor of Grace Commons (formerly known as Wicker Park Grace), an emerging faith community that began in an art gallery on the west side of Chicago. She currently serves both Grace Commons and St. James Presbyterian Church as solo pastor. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), she has blogged at The Christian Century’s lectionary blog, the Emergent Village Blog at Patheos, and at nanettesawyer.com. She has a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and an MDiv from McCormick Theological Studies, where she has also taught as adjunct faculty. She is the author of Hospitality: The Sacred Art.
