Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity
“He had answered them well”
An intriguing and difficult Gospel, it signals the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the one who is the fulfillment of the Law, the one in whom the love of God and the love of neighbour is perfectly realized. But that turns on another important point, namely, the idea of Jesus Christ as the Messiah, the anointed one of God. Both are the strong truth claims of the Gospel about Jesus as Lord. It is worth unpacking them a bit in relation to one of the scribes who engages with Jesus respectfully and intelligently, so much so that Jesus will say that “thou art not far from the kingdom of God.”
One of the scribes “having heard them reasoning together” perceives that Jesus “had answered them well.” Who was reasoning together about what and with whom? The “reasoning together” is really a disputation, an examination of matters of contention. Jesus is engaged in a dispute with the Sadducees about marriage and resurrection. The idea of resurrection was a matter of debate within late Judaism. The Sadducees were a group within Israel who, as Mark puts it, “say that there is no resurrection.” They undertake to entrap Jesus about the law regarding “levirate marriage” in the Law of Moses: the idea that the brother of a deceased man is obliged to marry his brother’s widow and raise up children for him. The term “levirate” simply means ‘a husband’s brother.’ The concern, I think, is about a way of providing for the care of the widow and for the continuation of the family line. The Sadducees manufacture a complicated ‘what-if’ scenario of a series of seven brothers who one by one take the first brother’s wife after his death only for each of them to die without a child. The question they put to Jesus is “whose wife will she be in the resurrection since the seven had her as wife?”
At issue is an understanding of the Law and a question about the resurrection. Jesus’ response catches the attention of one of the scribes who has overheard the exchange. Jesus says rather bluntly the Sadducees are wrong because they “neither know the scriptures nor the power of God.” He points out that in heaven they “neither marry nor are given in marriage” so the whole scenario is moot. He reminds them about the burning bush where God says to Moses that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, patriarchs whose lives and deaths are noted in Genesis. His point is that the revelation of God to Moses assumes that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are raised up and are alive. “He is not God of the dead but of the living” Jesus says and, once again, adds “you are quite wrong.”
