If you were to ask most pastors if it’s a good idea to preach your way systematically through books of the Bible, almost all of us would say “yes.” We’d probably go on to say that it’s a good discipline, for us and for the congregation, because it forces us to deal with aspects of scripture that we’re not comfortable with or texts that aren’t that clear. On the other hand, this morning’s text is a good example of why most of us would prefer to avoid some passages of scripture and skip over them to something that is more comfortable or clearer.
Over the last few months, when we haven’t
been in a special series for Christmas or Easter, we’ve been working our way
steadily through the second half of Mark. First we followed Jesus as he made
his way up to
In Mark 11.28 the chief priests confronted him and challenged him to produce his credentials. They asked who gave him authority to preach.
In Mark 12.14 two opposing groups, the Pharisees and the Herodians, ask Jesus one question, “Should we pay the Roman taxes?”
In today’s reading yet another powerful
group in
Let’s deal with the story first. How many found this story a bit icky?... Why?
It’s not the main point of the passage but I do want to take a couple of minutes to explain what the Sadducees are talking about, because I suspect some people won’t be able to get past the marriage story.
It’s called “levirate marriage.” It appears
in the Bible in Gen 38:8; Deut 25:5–6 and Ruth 4, and it’s still common
around the world today. In many tribal societies there is no role for women
that doesn’t include them being someone’s daughter or someone’s wife. If a
woman is unmarried and her father dies she becomes an orphan. If she is married
and her husband dies she becomes a widow. We saw a lot of that amongst Afghans
when we worked in
But what is a woman to do when she is no longer part of a household? In most cases she can’t work. She has no skills for anything outside the house. Commonly these widows are reduced to begging or prostitution to support themselves and their children. If her husband’s brother takes her in, he has a problem. He now has a woman in his house who is neither his daughter nor his wife. Most tribal societies have strict gender boundaries, so, for the sake of his reputation, and hers, he has to marry her, even if he already has a wife.
It serves the family too. It allows the wife to have children who will inherit her husband’s land and so keep the family’s economic resources intact. She can’t inherit the land, but her children can. And although Deuteronomy only mentions a son, Numbers 27 makes it clear that her daughters would inherit if there is no son to carry on the line.
So although it may seem perverse to us, it was actually a way of protecting the vulnerable long before there was welfare.
But when the Sadducees ask Jesus this
question they’re not really interested in marriage. It’s probably a
hypothetical question anyway, like those questions you had in school. “A train
sets out from
You see, the Sadducees didn’t believe in an
afterlife. In Acts 23.8, Luke, who is writing for people who had never
been to
When people asked Jesus serious and
thoughtful questions, he treated them graciously and led them deeper into
understanding. When they tried to play around with him, he shut them down
really quickly. Jesus replied, “Are you not in error because
you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?” The Message translates it this way, “You’re way off
base, and here’s why: One, you don’t know your Bibles; two, you don’t know how
God works.”
The Sadducees were “in error.” That means they were wrong. Now, I know that these days it’s politically incorrect to tell anybody they’re wrong, but Jesus did it and I think he would expect us to do the same in appropriate situations.
[I remember when I was doing my training as a teacher of English as a Second Language, one thing that we had to do was to go through some writing exercises by students and identify errors in their English. One of my classmates, whom I admit I already thought was a bit flaky, handed in her assignment with hardly any corrections on it. She thought it was “charming” and “creative” when the students spelled words wrongly or didn’t form a sentence properly so that you didn’t know what they were trying to say. It wasn’t “charming” or “creative.” It was wrong! And, more to the point, the students wanted to read and write real English that communicated their thoughts, not produce something that some flaky teacher thought was “charming.”]
In the process of shutting down the Sadducees, Jesus puts his finger on two things that form us as believers; two things that will keep us from going wrong in our faith. Knowing the scriptures. And knowing the power of God.
My ordination council was only a few weeks ago, and if I might be permitted to quote myself, this is what I wrote in my ordination statement about scripture. “All that we have said about God, creation and mission is rooted in scripture. The Scriptures, the Old and New Testaments, are God’s revelation to us of his character, his acts and his will, coming to us as the result of God’s interactions with people in history.”
When I was pursuing my Master of Divinity at McMaster my original intention was to specialise in Theology, but I changed that and specialised in Biblical Studies. I did that for a very simple reason. I wanted to engage first hand with the only objective source of information about God that we have; the text of scripture. By objective I mean it is real. It is external to you and me. Perhaps it’s my background in engineering, but I like the idea that there is a real body of data that constrains what I can and cannot say about God, creation, people, the afterlife... Everything else is subjective, internal, if not to me then to someone else. Let me give you an extreme example.
[The bestseller “Conversations with God” has sold over 2.5 million copies.
The author, Neale Donald Walsch, says that one day he simply started writing
down his direct conversations with God. Here is one of those conversations…
God: I cannot tell you
My Truth until you stop telling Me yours. Walsch:
But my truth about God comes from You. God:
Who said so? Walsch: Others. God: What others? Walsch: Leaders. Ministers. Rabbis. Priests. Books. The Bible, for
heaven's sake! God: Those are not
authoritative sources. Walsch: They
aren't? God: No. Walsch: Then what is? God:
Listen to your feelings. Listen to your Highest Thoughts. Listen to your experience.
Whenever any one of these differ from what you've been told by your teachers,
or read in your books, forget the words.]
It must be very heartening for Walsch to have a god who tells him that he, Walsch, is the final measure of truth or error; that whenever the Bible (or the Qur’an, or the Bhagavad Gita for that matter) disagree with him, they are wrong and he is right. I really find it hard to comprehend the towering arrogance of such a claim.
Compare that with this story about Karl Barth, a man with a colossal intellect and probably the single most influential theologian of the twentieth century.
[During his one visit to
Barth just thought for a moment and then smiled and said, 'Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.']
It is possible to meet Jesus outside of exposure to the Bible. It is possible to even to commit your life to him and receive salvation without ever reading a verse of scripture or even seeing a Bible. But I do not believe it is possible to faithfully follow Jesus or to learn to know God as he truly is, without studying scripture. If we don’t, we will be like the Sadducees, “in error.”
That’s not to say that knowing scripture is the be all and end all of faith. Jesus said the Sadducees were “in error” because they did not know the Scriptures or the power of God. Jesus is saying that a healthy faith, a healthy relationship with God, is a matter of both knowledge and experience.
Those of you who were at my ordination service will know that Mark Boda, the speaker, gave me a reading assignment from the pulpit; a book by RT Kendall called “The Anointing.” Well, I haven’t finished it yet, but I have started, and I think RT Kendall is a good example of the kind of person Jesus would have us become, the opposite of the Sadducees.
In the preface Rob Parsons (a church leader
in the
Biblically, you don’t really know something until you experience it. That doesn’t mean that our experiences decide for us what is truth. But it does mean that truth is more than just a set of statements about something. For us, as Christians, the truth is a person (Jesus) whom we know, and love, and follow, and obey. We experience that truth in our lives through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, as he takes the scripture and applies it to our lives, to change us into the reflection of Christ himself.
Jesus’ beef with the Sadducees was not just that they didn’t read their Bibles, but also because they restricted all of reality to what they could see and hear and left no place for God to anything they couldn’t explain. They did not know the power of God.
If you refuse to listen to what the Bible says about reality, and you close yourself off to the action of God in your life, then all you have left is you. Your ideas. Your perceptions. Your experience. Your thoughts.
The Sadducees couldn’t see the world of the spirit so they denied its existence. And materialistic thinking naturally leads to materialistic ideas of what we are and of our future, so, as a result, they believed that we all just ceased to exist when we died.
It’s interesting that Jesus didn’t try to argue them into changing their minds. He simply made a blunt statement, “When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.” Not, “if the dead rise.” “When the dead rise.” There is no question in Jesus’ mind that there will be a resurrection. In fact he was about to inaugurate it.
We talked about this on Easter Sunday. When the Bible talks about “resurrection” it means that when Jesus returns our non-material essence (if you like) will be reunited with a physical body of some sort. It’s clear that it will be different in many ways from what we have now, but it will also be recognisably the same. Jesus’ resurrected body was different – he could walk through walls – but it was also the same – he had the marks of the nails and the spear thrust in his side.
One of the differences is that in the resurrection they will neither marry nor be given in marriage. That may not sit well with the romantics among us but it makes sense, since they will be like the angels. Angels don’t die; neither will we after we have been resurrected. So there will be no need to replenish the stock of humanity, so no physical need for sex. And, like the angels, we will have no barriers to knowing and understanding each other. Those were raised by the first sin in the garden. Adam and Eve blamed each other and hid from each other and from God. So, without those barriers, there will no longer be a need for exclusive relationships like marriage. We will all know and be known completely, but without shame or fear.
This kind of transformation is something that you can’t reason your way to philosophically. It depends on the power of God to make the dead live again. You can’t get there from here just by looking at the evidence around you and extrapolating into the future. It takes a radical act of God to bring it about. We believe it to be true because Jesus was resurrected, and because we have begun to experience God’s resurrection power in our own lives. We know something of the power of God.
The final nail in the Sadducees’ coffin is
Jesus’ quote from Exodus 3.5. The Sadducees only believed in a shortened
version of the Bible, just the first five books. To be fair to them; there’s
not a lot about resurrection those books. But Jesus points them to one of the
key scriptures in all of the Old Testament. When God introduces himself to
Moses, he says, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and
the God of Jacob.” Not I was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but I am.
And Jesus takes that to mean that they are still alive in some way, since God
is the God of the living, not the dead. If Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are still
alive, with God, awaiting the final resurrection, then we can have hope that
when we die, we too will go to be with God, to await our final resurrection
when Jesus returns to set everything to rights.
In the meantime, unlike the Sadducees, we can seek to study and know scripture well, so we can faithfully and truly follow Jesus. And we can be open to God pouring out his power into our lives so that we can be a blessing to those around us.