Scripture Matthew 22:23-33
The same day some Sadducees came to him, saying there is no resurrection; and they questioned him, saying, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘If a man dies without having children, his brother shall marry the woman, and raise up offspring for his brother.’ Now there were seven brothers among us; the first married, and without having offspring, leaving the woman to his brother. The same for the second, and the third, to the seventh. After everything the woman died. In the resurrection, then, for which of the seven will she be wife? For they all had her.” Jesus answered them, “You all are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, rather they are like angels in heaven. And about the resurrection of the dead, have you all not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? God is God not of the dead, but of the living.” And when the crowd heard it, they were astounded at his teaching.
Sermon
Early in the Old Testament, there’s a little gem of a book—just four chapters—recounting the story of three women, who have all lost their husbands and become widows. They are a matriarch and her two daughters-in-law. A deeply depressed matriarch decides to return to her hometown of Bethlehem, alone, forbidding her daughters-in-law from coming along. One of the younger women finally agrees to return to her parents’ house, but the other refuses. She will not leave her mother-in-law, and vows to follow her wherever she goes, promising lifelong love and loyalty.
Upon returning to Bethlehem, the matriarch and her daughter-in-law search for some means of survival and stability. Widowhood in the ancient world was a perilous, sometimes deadly sentence. The matriarch’s deceased husband has family in Bethlehem, and her daughter-in-law goes to glean grain from a parcel of land owned by one such man. Immediately a future opens itself up for the matriarch and her daughter-in-law: that future concerns something called “levirate marriage.”
Levirate marriage was an arrangement in which a widow might marry her husband’s brother, or other next-of-kin, especially if she and her deceased husband had not had children. In fact, it was required for the deceased man’s next-of-kin to step up and marry the widow. It was law. This afforded the woman some protection—preventing her from starving to death, or even resorting to the oldest profession to stay alive. But the real purpose of the arrangement is the children. The man who has died is entitled to have his name live on, and it will live on because of the children his brother will father in his name. This story I’ve described, the story of Ruth, is one of several stories in the Old Testament in which this practice plays an important part.
Why am I talking about Ruth and levirate marriage? Well, you can blame the Sadducees for that. The Sadducees was an elite society of Jews from wealthy backgrounds. The Sadducees took their name from Zadok, who was high priest during the reign of King Solomon. They were aligned with the Temple priests, whom Jesus spends some time criticizing for various practices he disagrees with. They were responsible they for maintenance of the temple, and had priestly duties, even though they were not priests themselves.
Our passage takes place during Holy Week, when Jesus is teaching in the temple. Different groups challenge him as he is teaching, including priests, scribes, and Pharisees. Here, the Sadducees bring Jesus a story which, for years I have believed was entirely hypothetical. It involves the practice of levirate marriage. Why, you ask, do the Sadducees have such concerns about levirate marriage? I doubt very much that they care about it at all. This story is designed to trip up Jesus, maybe even to humiliate him. This isn’t really about the bride or the grooms. It’s about resurrection.
The Sadducees have an issue with resurrection. The issue is, they don’t believe in it. That Jesus has a reputation for raising people from the dead doesn’t sit well with them, and they probably don’t believe that he’s done any such thing. They don’t believe in the immortality of the soul, or in an afterlife of any kind. They do believe in the importance of scripture, and in philosophical and religious debate. And they believe that human beings have free will.
But today, their concern is resurrection. They bring this story to Jesus: Whose wife will she be in the afterlife (which they don’t believe in), after marrying all seven brothers?
This story is deeply troubling. It is the story of a woman who seems to have no ability to exercise free will, who has no control over her own life or her body. What happens to her sounds like a nightmare, being passed from brother to brother, as if she were a thing, an object, and not a human being at all. She has been treated more like a farm animal than anything else, with reproduction being the be-all and end-all of her life. Her life would not have counted for anything if she did not fulfill this function.
Jesus’s response is swift and sharp. I believe Jesus is horrified at this use of the levirate law. Throughout his ministry Jesus reaches out to those on the fringes of society, those who are less valued, even shunned. He famously dines with sex workers, tax collectors, and sinners. He reiterates and upholds the Old Testament law of caring for those who are most vulnerable—widows, orphans, and immigrants. The well-intentioned, but highly problematic practice of levirate marriage has its limits. When a woman has no agency over being handed from one brother to another, ad infinitum, I have a strong hunch that Jesus would no longer see it as caring for her. It begins to look and feel much more like exploiting her.
Jesus says, “You all are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.” Imagine the looks on the faces of the Sadducees, as they are accused of not knowing the scriptures they treasure. Imagine these priest-adjacent individuals being accused of not knowing the power of God.
The power of God is such that God can, in fact, raise people from the dead. This is Jesus’ lived experience, he, through whom that power has been exercised more than once. Resurrection is encoded in creation. In a recent UPC Book Group selection, “The Island of Missing Trees,” the narrator tells a kind of resurrection story that happens again and again in creation. The context for this is the recovery of the missing remains of people who had died during a prolonged and bitter conflict on the isle of Cyprus in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The narrator says,
The bodies of the missing, if unearthed, would be taken care of by their loved ones, and given the proper burials they deserved. But even those who would never be found were not exactly forsaken. Nature tended to them. Wild thyme and sweet marjoram grew from the same soil, the ground splitting open like a crack in a window, to make way for possibilities. Myriad birds, bats, and ants carried those seeds far away, where they would grow into fresh vegetation. In the most surprising ways, the victims continued to live, because that is what nature did to death: it transformed abrupt endings into a thousand new beginnings.[i]
In response to the Sadducees, Jesus turns to the well-known and well-loved words of God to Moses, from the burning bush: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” (Exodus 3:6) (Or, if you like, the God of Sarah, Hagar, and Keturah, the God of Rebekkah, and the God of Rachel and Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah, to name the women who bore the children of those ancestors.) Jesus says, God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. If God describes Godself in this way, surely the ancestors live. Surely, death is not a mere sleep, but an ineffable place, out of space and time, where their relationship with God continues and thrives and blesses every descendant.
The words of Jesus silence the Sadducees, and they end the debate. Jesus has used scripture to silence them.
There is something beautifully poetic about Jesus’s ruling on the one bride for seven brothers proposition. Jesus places the goodness and power of God side by side with his conviction that those things that concerns us in this world pale in God’s presence. The social mores of first century Palestine, or 21st century America, for that matter, are no longer preeminent. Women are, at last, on a level playing field with men. Now, beyond concerns of inheritance and family trees, those who rest in God’s presence are truly living the promise of Genesis: all made in the image and likeness of God, male and female, with no distinction.
This is the promise of the gospel. It is the promise of baptism: that death has lost its sting, because, in Christ, we continue to live, even after our bodies become too frail or broken to sustain our lives on this earth. The resurrection season is not only for Jesus. It is for us, too. We see it in nature, wherein God transforms endings into a thousand new beginnings. And we see it in our faith, when our end is, always, a new beginning.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees (London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.), 2021. Chapter 71, Audible Version.