Til Death Do Us Part
Til Death Do Us Part
Matthew 22:23-35
This past week saw the Jewish Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It is a time for Jews to consider their relationship with God, to repent of sin and, were there a temple, to make sacrifices of atonement and reconciliation. Leviticus 23:26-32 calls it a Sabbath of Sabbaths. It is the most holy day of the year to Jews. This period of renewal began with Rosh Hashanah, this year on September 22. It is a time for teshuvah, returning to the right path. During the ten days of Rosh Hashanah and ending with Yom Kippur, Jews are encouraged to make amends to people they may have offended during the year, and to God 1. Rosh Hashanah is the “head of the year,” the beginning of the Jewish calendar 2. The observance continues through Sukkot, which begins tomorrow and is a remembrance of the Exodus. We have called it the Feast of Tabernacles, or Booths. Jews build an outdoor shelter to live in during the seven-day celebration. It is also called the Feast of the Ingathering, to celebrate the end of the harvest season 3. For Jews, this is a high and holy time of the year, a time to draw closer to God and to one another, to reflect and to remember and to offer praise to God. It is also a time to remember that God is the Righteous Judge, to whom all must answer.
We begin this way because, the Pharisees having been defeated, the Sadducees come to Jesus to have their go at him. One can imagine the Sadducees standing at a distance watching Jesus confound the Pharisees. Perhaps he is really one of us, they may have been thinking. There are a couple of important points for us before we go on.
We are introduced here to the second of the four main parties of Jews during the Second Temple period. They did not divide religion and politics, nor did they have the concept of the separation of church and state. They understood, as we often do not, that religion and politics are inextricably intertwined, that our faith affects our politic. The Jews were theocratic, believing that God was their king, and that Caesar was an interloper in Jewish life. So beside having different beliefs (as we define it), they had different political leanings because of their belief. The Pharisees we know. They believed that if God were to deliver them and restore the kingdom, they should be righteous and keep the law. The Zealots believed that if they were to be free and the kingdom to be restored, they would have to win it by force. The Essenes believed that the current Jewish society was inescapably corrupt and the only solution was to leave and prepare to be the eventual replacement when the empire collapsed. The Sadducees believed that one must “go along to get along,” that compromise was the best way forward. They were friendliest toward the Romans, and as a result had more political clout and were among the wealthy elite of Jewish society.
The Sadducees, unlike the Pharisees, accepted only the Torah as scripture. They did not accept the Writings or the Prophets, and like some groups today, had decided that if a concept or word did not appear in their Scripture, the Torah, it was not to be believed. Thus, they did not believe in an afterlife. There was no heaven or hell, just the grave. So Matthew begins, the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection ...
Came to Jesus with a question about the resurrection. Ironic. They pose a question to Jesus about something they don’t even believe. You know it’s a trap. And they pose such a tangle that it seems their intention was to catch Jesus in a contradiction, accuse him of some failure of logic, and thus discredit him. They had watched with glee as Jesus deftly defeated their political adversaries. Where the Pharisees failed, they thought they would succeed. Here’s the question:
It’s a question of levirate marriage. They began with Moses; so will we. Deuteronomy 25:5-6 – 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. The purpose of this rule was so that the name and property of the deceased would not leave his family, but would carry on through his offspring. Thus the widow was to marry the brother, have a son and give him her deceased husband’s name and inheritance. It was a practical way to protect tribal and family property.
So, ask the Sadducees, suppose a man died, his brother married his widow but had no children. He dies, and a second brother marries the widow, but he also dies without a son. A third brother follows suit. There are seven brothers and each one dies without leaving a son. Since the woman was married to seven men in succession, whose wife is she in heaven? She is a widow seven times over, but which man will be her husband in heaven? It’s a clever puzzle, because the principle of marriage, laid down in Genesis, was that a man leaves his father and mother, is united to his wife, and the two, husband and wife, become one flesh. One man, one woman, one flesh. There was no real polygamy or polyandry in Judaism, and levirate marriage was only for the extenuating circumstance of a man dying without an heir. So, one man, one woman, but in the puzzle, there are seven men.
Jesus responded, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.” They make two serious errors. First, they don’t know the Scripture. Second, they don’t know the God of the Scriptures.
First, God doesn’t do things our way. Jesus has already been telling them that the kingdom of God is not like the kingdoms of man. Things are different, no matter how much we want them to be the same. God spoke to Isaiah, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa 55:8-9).
Now, let me tell you, Jesus’ words here are a bit troubling to us, particularly if we’ve lost a beloved spouse. We honestly look forward to seeing them again in heaven and being reunited to them. The Mormon church even tries to overcome the difficulty of Jesus’ words by “sealing” a marriage for eternity. They say, in a temple wedding, that a husband and wife are sealed together for all eternity. But that’s not what Jesus says, and is actually contrary to what Jesus says.
“At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage.” What! No marriage in heaven? But I want to be with this one I love. I want to spend eternity with her.
Let me just stop for a moment. What is our first love? What is most important to us? Jesus told us to “seek first” what? His kingdom. His righteousness. Our first love is to be Jesus Christ. The thing most heavenly about heaven is Jesus. We go to be with our Lord. We go to be with Jesus. We will gather around his throne and sing his praises. And, by the way, I want a wife who wants Jesus more than she wants me. The focus of heaven is all on Jesus, not on what we had on earth.
And Jesus says, we will be like the angels in heaven. Note this – we will not be angels. We do not become angels. We are not given a harp and a halo. We will not be angels, but in the matter of marriage, we will be like the angels, not concerned with earthly arrangements, but focused on Jesus. We don’t have time for the whole discussion of 1 Corinthians 7, regarding marriage and divorce, but only to note this advice from Paul, verse 39 – A woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord. Paul was speaking to women of faith married to men who were not believers. He would have the same advice for men. When a spouse dies, we are free to remarry. But make sure this one belongs to God. Be sure he or she is a believer, who puts Jesus first. You are married here; death breaks that bond.
“But about the resurrection of the dead ...” I want you to understand that Jesus is not talking about his resurrection here, but of ours. And the irony of the whole conversation is that people who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead were asking a question about the resurrection of the dead. People who did not believe in heaven were asking questions about heaven. And they’re doing it the way a lot of people today ask questions about Christianity or the Bible. They don’t believe in God, so they ask questions about God to try to trap up. They don’t know the Scriptures, but they ask questions about things they’ve heard, hoping to trap us in our “silly” theology. Doesn’t the Bible tell you ...? And the answer is usually, no the Bible does not say that. I was working on a manuscript and came across something I’d written a couple years ago. Some news person or professor of religion made the comment, “As the Bible says, moderation in all things.” No, it doesn’t. There is no such quote in the Bible. “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Nope. Not in the Bible. The Bible says that you are to burn witches. Nope. It doesn’t. One I heard recently – the Bible says to kill gays. Leviticus 18:22 says not to have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, but the end of the chapter tells Israel to “cut off” people who do that from their community. It does not say to kill them. If you don’t believe the Bible, don’t try to tell me what it says.
Jesus did this to the Pharisees. Now he does it to the Sadducees. “Have you not read ...?” Let’s just pick a verse the Sadducees would have accepted: Exodus 3:6, where God told Moses, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” Note, please – God did not tell Moses, “I was Abraham’s God.” Even though Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are long gone, God did not say, “I was ...”, but “I am ...” I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Present tense, as if to say, “I am still Abraham’s God; I am still Isaac’s God; I am still Jacob’s God.” How important language is. Words matter because they mean things. Was and am are vastly different. “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” Jesus was telling the smug Sadducees that Abraham was not really dead at all. Nor was Isaac. Nor was Jacob. And he was using their own Scripture to show them.
Those patriarchs had not died; they had merely changed addresses. They moved from this earthly realm to the heavenly realm. Where God had been present with them before, now they were present with God. Which means that when we die, when believers die, we do not really die – we simply change worlds. We change locations. We lay down this body here, walk into the presence of Jesus and take up a new body. That is why Paul told the church at Thessalonika, Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope (1 Thes 4:13). Death for the believer is sleep. We go to sleep here and wake up there. But that’s why we have such mixed emotions at a time of death. We mourn the parting, but rejoice knowing where the trusting soul has gone. The dead in Christ do not truly die. For God is the God of the living. There is a resurrection, assured to us by the Scripture assertion of God himself, “I am the God of Abraham.”
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul begins with an early church creed that asserts Jesus’ resurrection. He recounts the witnesses, and then defends the necessity of Jesus’ physical resurrection, as the foundation and affirmation of our faith. But then, in verse 35, he begins a discussion of the resurrection body. He details the different natures of fish, plants, birds, animals, stars, and planets, using the word for glory. Each has it’s own glory, it’s own peculiar nature. And with all the differences, we know they are all physical realities. In death, then, the body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable ... It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body (1 Co 15:43-44). But at every turn, it is a body, a soma, a physical reality.
It is a message of hope. Resurrection is real. God is the God of the living. There is an old hymn, “I Know God’s Promise Is True”. The fourth stanza begins, “Eternal life, begun below, now fills my heart and soul. I’ll sing His praise forevermore, who has redeemed my soul.” When we die, we don’t become spirits, or ghosts. We simple exchange this mortal body for an immortal one, and walk into the presence of our living Lord.
1 Philip Goodman, The Yom Kippur Anthology (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1992), p xv.
2 Goodman, The Rosh Hashanah Anthology (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1992)
3 Goodman, The Sukkot/Simhat Torah Anthology (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1988)