Initially when I was crafting this sermon, I was going to entitle it Saturday Night Live, and was going to say “Live from Timothy Eaton, this is Saturday Night” – and get you all to sit bolt upright waiting for the guest star to make fun of the whole world! But in light of the last few weeks, I thought, “No, Stirling, you would be wise not to call it Saturday Night Live, for people will think that there would be some political parody from the pulpit, and I don’t do that very well.” So I am not calling it Saturday Night Live but I am still thinking of it that way because the passage deals with something that occurred on a Saturday Night. Many of us read this passage and we are a little confused about it. What on earth was going on in this discussion between Jesus and some of the religious leaders?
Let’s put it in the context of Saturday Night Live. Why? Because on the Sabbath, Saturday evening, people would often gather at temples and synagogues all around Israel, and participate in theological debates. These theological debates would take place between different parties, almost political parties, who would argue points of theology and the interpretation of Scripture. People would attend, like it was Saturday night entertainment, and listen to the question and answer period, and throw in their two bits to the rabbis who were there to get answers to their questions. In other words, Saturday night in the Temple had become informative entertainment for the masses in Israel two thousand years ago. It was probably on one of those nights that our text for today took place. It was in the context of a thriving debate, but in this particular case we have the presence of Jesus of Nazareth, changing the dynamic completely.
You see, word had already gotten out that Jesus was a man who spoke with authority. He had a mass following from Galilee that had worked its way into Jerusalem. Word was well known amongst the teachers and those who sat in the Temple that this Jesus of Nazareth, this country bumpkin from Galilee, was saying something powerful and was bringing very disturbing news for them. And so, finally, they have Jesus in the Temple, and this is their moment. Maybe we can belittle him. Maybe we can make fun of him. Maybe we can make him look like the bumpkin that he really is! One group of people, known as the Sadducees, set out to trick Jesus. You can imagine the anticipation of the entertainment factor in trying to fool somebody!
I don’t watch much late night television, but I did see a clip from Jimmy Kimmel after one of the Presidential debates. Kimmel went out into the streets with a microphone to interview people about their thoughts on the debate. He asked them this question, “What did you think when Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton kissed each other at the end of the debate?”
People responded, “I thought it was a beautiful thing – a sign that deep in their own hearts they are people of love.”
Another person said, “Oh, this is a sign that all will be well, that there will be peace on earth.”
Somebody said, “Deep down, Hilary is a warm and a caring person.”
Another one said, “Donald Trump is a warm and embracing person.” And, on and on these people went! Of course, there was no kiss between Donald and Hilary! But all these people had an opinion about something that never actually happened! They seemed like fools!
This was what the Sadducees were doing to Jesus: get him in the Temple, pose a question to him, trip him up, and make him look like a fool. But there was a darker side than that. They were also trying to belittle the concept of the Resurrection of the dead. Not only were they trying to trip up Jesus, they were trying to trip up anybody that believed in the Resurrection – and I will say a bit more about that in a few moments. This is how they tried to trip him up. They quoted from Scripture, from the Book of Deuteronomy, Chapter 25, verse five. That particular passage deals with a widow and the belief was that the brother of the deceased should marry the widow as long as he is not married. In other words, you marry your sister-in-law for two reasons: one of them to maintain the family name and tradition, to keep it alive; and the other, as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, because widows were so often vulnerable, it provided a source of income and protection for them. The brother would now take over caring for the widow. It also hoped that there would be family and children, and that the name and the lineage could continue. In that particular era, they were obsessed with the maintenance of the family name, because if they didn’t have it, they thought that God would forget about them!
Not only do they ask him this question, they said, “Tell us what would happen, if for example, the brother died and then another brother came along, and then another brother came along, and there were no children, and then another one came along. What would happen if there were seven brothers who were to marry this widow, and the widow would die, (and then they ask the punch-line question), who would she be married to in heaven?” You can imagine the laughter. It would have been on the top ten of the funniest moments in Jerusalem that night and Jesus, they thought, would have egg on his face!
They were not only getting at Jesus; the Sadducees were also taking a crack at the Pharisees. Oftentimes, we think of the Pharisees as the quintessentially bad people in The New Testament, because Jesus was always debating with them, particularly about their interpretation of minute laws. Jesus had a lot in common with the Pharisees, but he had little in common with the Sadducees. The Sadducees were the elite, the powerful, to use the language of today, the political insiders. They provided the context to every story. They played hand-in-hand with the Romans. They were the supreme Jewish group, and this elite group did not believe that there would be a Messiah. They had discounted the notion of the Messiah, because they only gave authority to the first five books of The Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. They only believed that those five books constituted the Bible. Prophets, Psalms, Proverbs, didn’t factor into their beliefs. And it is there that we find all the talk about the coming Messiah. They also believed in total free will, that human beings decide everything. There is no role for God in anything whatsoever. All we have to do is exercise our free will and that is all that matters. They also, and this is quite striking and most important, did not believe in the Resurrection of the dead. Unlike the Pharisees, who believed in the Resurrection and that God was still active, and who were waiting for the Messiah, these Sadducees wanted to belittle the Pharisees, and the rabbi Jesus from Nazareth, all of whom believed in the Resurrection of the dead. So, by tripping up Jesus, they were winning the day. This was, my friends, a nasty political debate.
How did Jesus respond? Brilliantly! He came to the defense of the Resurrection from the dead. He quotes from the book that they saw as authoritative, and this is key, from the Book of Exodus, Chapter 3, verses 1-6. He is quoting the appearance of God to Moses in the burning bush. God reveals himself to Moses through the burning bush, and says these words: “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” alternately Israel. By doing that says Jesus, he is showing that he is the God not of the dead, but of the living, and that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob live. They are not dead and buried, spiritually they have life. By appearing to Moses in the bush, God is affirming that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive. Then he makes that magnificent statement, “For God is the God of the living and not of the dead.” In other words, even in your own text, Sadducees, there is a sign of the Resurrection from the dead. Once that had been said, he put their argument to rest.
Jesus continues. You can sense that he is upset with these people, and rightly so, because Jesus did not see a continuity between this life and the life to come. It is not as if you just move from this life into the next, which is what the Sadducees were assuming it would be, and belittling it. In other words, you don’t have earthly marriages in heaven; you don’t have the same relationships in heaven that you have on earth. It is different, and because of that difference Jesus says there is no marriage in heaven. Rather, there is God, and with God there will be those who live in God. There is nothing to suggest that those whom we love we will not see again. Jesus is not saying that, but he is saying there is not a continuous line between this life and the life to come, nor is he saying that life comes to an end. He is not saying there is no life to come, but rather that there is. In fact, you could argue that the whole of his ministry was based around what would ultimately happen to him with his own Resurrection, that he becomes the Resurrection and the Life, the embodiment of the God of the Living. This is a powerful moment between those Sadducees, who have now been put in their place by their own Scriptures, and Jesus. I don’t know what the Pharisees would have done, but I would have thought maybe they might have broken out in very polite applause: “Well done, Jesus of Nazareth! You finally shut up the Sadducees!”
Jesus not only talks about being the God of the Living, he talks about the fact that we live with him, that he is the God of Life ever more. At the end of this passage, something powerful happens: God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, and the living are those who have gone before us, the living are those who are with us here, and the living are those who are yet to be. What unites time is God. What unites life is God. The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth said that because of this, voices from the past should be heard today, that those who have gone before us should be listened to, that their counsel should be adhered to, and that we should learn from the voices of the past. The problem is, and it was a problem for the Sadducees, the tyranny of the present, where you think that the only thing that really matters is what we think today, and that the only part of life is what is happening at this very moment. We dismiss life past. We dismiss the lives of those who have lived, and we think that somehow we are on our own, and that living is only about the now. Jesus understood when he said, “God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” he is saying he is not only the God of the present; he is also the God of the past; and we need to learn from that God for God is the God of the living, and not the dead.
On Friday afternoon, in this very sanctuary, at 1 o’clock, something remarkable happened. It was Remembrance Day. All the Remembrance Day events at the Cenotaph were over, all the voices were stilled, but here, in this sanctuary a survivor of the Holocaust came and addressed children from Arrowsmith School down the road. I had been invited to host this event so that the children would have a place to hear Dr. Felicia Carmelly, a Romanian Jew, who as a young girl had been transported through Transnistria, and placed in one of the camps. She told the story of what happened to her, and I have never seen school children, some of whom struggled with some personal things, listen to somebody quite like that. She told the story of how she was put in a cattle car with her family, how they stood on the straw and the dung of the cattle for three days because there was no room to lie down. How every few minutes somebody collapsed, and many died, and they lived with the dead at their feet. There were no windows to see out, just slats along the side of the trains. It was cold. There was no water, there was no bread. There were no washrooms or latrines; just people crammed like animals in a coach of a train, travelling to their death.
After she finished her story and described with incredible grace her own survival, in telling about her parents who had died in the concentration camp, there was this silence, just silence, from the children. I came to her afterwards and asked, “Dr. Carmelly, how do you do this? How do you remember this? Where do you get your strength from?”
She said, “Well, Dr. Stirling, only one thing is on my mind and that is: how are the dead to speak today if we don’t remember?”
I came back to reading the Gospel of Luke and thought, “Jesus is right. This is ultimately the God of the living.” The Sadducees can say that they do not believe in the Resurrection and the life to come. They can say that we are put in the ground and forgotten, dead and buried, and we can make fun of all the images in heaven or in hell, but that is not hope, it is despair, and it doesn’t ring true. Not that we know what the life to come will be like; we don’t. We need to hear the voices from the past, but even those voices cannot give us a picture of the life of the Resurrection and life with the Lord of Life.
I have been reading again recently some of The Chronicles of Narnia. I suppose during the winter I fell in love with C. S. Lewis again in Oxford. In it, there is the story of a woman who is thrown into a dungeon, and there with her very little child she sits in the dark. The only window is way up on the wall and the wall is covered with bars, and so the young boy grows up with no idea what is on the other side of that window. His mother, trying to capture it, asks one of the guards for a piece of paper and some charcoal, and she draws what she thinks the outside world looks like. She shows it to her son, and he then conceives of the world outside as nothing more than black and grey and white lines, with no colour or dimension! The Apostle Paul says that we see through a glass darkly. Plato would use the illustration of the cave. We don’t see completely what is beyond ourselves, and because we do not know what is, we make up things like the Sadducees did about seven brothers being married to one woman, and foolishness like that. We all do it at sometimes. There is a bit of a Sadducee in all of us really. We wonder what the next life will be like. Jesus never speculates! He says, “Remember it is, and it will not be quite what you think.” Lastly, there is also this profound sense in this that God is the God of the living right now, and that this is not a God who abandons us. The Sadducees thought that all there was “then” and “now” for them and that all that mattered was their power and their prestige. Jesus saw that the God of the Living is the God of the future as well, and hence his own life and death and resurrection. In this life God has not abandoned us.
This week, in partial celebration of “Faith in Canada 150”, which you probably saw in the Order of Service the last few weeks, we are preparing people of all faiths to get ready for the 150th Anniversary of our nation. We are doing workshops and holding meetings about the role of faith communities and the development of this great and glorious land. We had such a meeting on Thursday morning over breakfast, and every major religious tradition was there, and we all got along so well. Of course, we were given really great muffins and strong coffee – and that never hurts! We gathered around and we just talked to one another. It was twenty-four hours after the U.S. election, and I can’t begin to tell you the breadth of views that were in that room! If anyone thinks that we are homogeneous, forget it! There was every imaginable and conceivable view from fear and terror to hope and celebration to people being devastated. It was everything! Yet, as we all talked with one another, there was one thing that came out loud and clear. It wasn’t passivity; it wasn’t that we step back and do nothing; it was the recognition that all earthly powers – and I mentioned the Sadducees – ultimately are accountable to the living God. It is to that living God that we turn, and it is to that living God that we pray for wisdom and guidance and the protection of the world. A group of us who were Christian decided that we would pray on our own after this, and we did. We prayed that the sovereign Lord would have his hands on the world he loves so much and died for. We did that because we believe that God is alive. We did that because his Son is alive, and that we believe in the God of the Living. So, in a sense, that night was Saturday Night Live! Amen.