This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 11/09/25, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: Luke 20:27-38.
In our reading this morning from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is teaching in the Temple at Jerusalem, and he’s being confronted by various religious authorities – Pharisees and Sadducees – who seek to test this popular Rabbi who is causing such a stir. Many of the people believe he could be the messiah.
In the particular section that we heard this morning, it’s the Sadducees who are grilling Jesus. The Sadducees are the religious group in Jesus’ context that would have been considered both the most conservative and the most institutionally powerful. The Sadducee perspective predominated among the elite families that controlled the Temple and the priesthood.
The Roman occupation meant that the high priest was the highest ranking Jewish official in the province, and the Romans gave a lot of the responsibility of governing the day-to-day affairs of Judea to the high Jewish council – the Sanhedrin. This was a rather cozy affair for the Sadducees, so they were generally opposed to anything that would rock the boat.
The Pharisees were a much more broad-based, popular movement. They were considered much more progressive, both in that the movement included many non-elite people and because it introduced a great deal of religious innovation. For example, the Sadducees considered only the first five books of the Bible – the Pentateuch – to be holy scripture, but the Pharisees also included the rest of what we know as the Old Testament – the prophets and the writings – as well as a broad oral tradition. To the Sadducees, this was wild liberalism.
The Pharisees believed in angels and the resurrection. Sadducees didn’t believe in either. It is on the point of the resurrection of the dead that these elite religious leaders decided to press Jesus. They had been hearing Jesus teach on many matters, and Jesus, too, was an innovator – a “liberal”. To the Sadducees, no doubt, Jesus seemed like some kind of Pharisee.
So when the Sadducees approach Jesus in the Temple courtyard, they pose a hypothetical scenario. And we all know how hypothetical scenarios work in rhetoric. The purpose is to give the person being questioned only two options: Agree with the person asking the question, or tie themselves in knots trying to work within the constraints of the hypothetical scenario.
This reminds me of a rhetorical trick that is often played by people who want to debate Christian nonviolence. “What would you do,” they will ask, “if a man with a gun entered your house and was about to shoot your mother?” The question is framed so that the person being asked has only two presumed options: Abandon Christian nonviolence, or agree that they are OK seeing their mother killed. Rather than exploring a creative solution to an imaginary problem, we are told that there are only two options, and we must choose.
When hypothetical scenarios are crafted this way for the purpose of debate, they are instruments of falsehood. Even worse, they are tools to stifle our thinking and impair our human creativity. These kinds of hypotheticals are created to make us less thoughtful, less moral, and less realistic in our thinking. There are rarely – if ever – situations in life where there are only two possible choices.
We know this from our experience of discernment together as a church. This is one of the reasons that Quakers shy away from voting as a means of decision-making. Because voting often leads to premature choices based on false dilemmas. But when we open ourselves up to the will of God, laying aside our assumptions about what choices we have available, it’s amazing how often we find that we have far more freedom than we expected. God often has surprising guidance for us.
The Sadducees’ hypothetical scenario isn’t just a bad-faith rhetorical trick – it’s a symptom of a deeper problem. When we reduce reality to binary choices, we’re not just limiting our options in the moment. We’re training ourselves to approach all of reality as something we can master through logic and analysis. But the resurrection – and the God who brings it – simply won’t be contained.
The path to truth isn’t about getting better at constructing arguments or building tighter systems; it’s about learning to release our grip and enter the flow of a divine reality beyond our understanding.
So when Jesus gets this question from the Sadducees about the resurrection, he refuses to color within the lines. Rather than being captured by the assumptions of the ridiculous hypothetical that these religious elites throw at him, he reveals that reality is far more surprising than we ever would have imagined.
The Sadducees ask him, “If there is a resurrection of the dead, what happens when a woman has been married to seven different men? In the resurrection, whose wife is she? She was married to each one in this life, after all!” This is a question entirely based on a binary thought pattern of this age: A woman is either married to one man or to another. If both men are alive, she would now be married to both! That’s absurd, and so the resurrection can’t be real.
Jesus’ response is profound. He altogether sidesteps the reality that the Sadducees think that they know, the world as it is now. Instead, he reveals a totally weird, bizarrely different world that lies beyond this one. Jesus hints at a reality beyond the world order that we understand now, a world that is visible in the eyes and heart of God.
Jesus says, “In the world you live in, a woman is only married to one man. That’s common sense to you now. But in the world that is coming, in the life of the resurrection, a woman is more than a woman, and a man is more than a man. They have become children of the resurrection; they’ve become like angels. Marriage as we know it now is no longer a relevant concept – because in the resurrection, we have become something altogether different. We have become something so extraordinary that your un-resurrected minds can’t understand it yet.”
Jesus knows that the Sadducees consider the Book of Exodus to be legitimate scripture, and so he quotes it to them. He reminds them that when God spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, he identified himself as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Each of these men – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – had died by the time Moses came along. Yet to God, all of them are alive. “He is God not of the dead but of the living.”
What on earth is Jesus talking about? Seriously. It’s confusing. And not just from the perspective of the Sadducees, who didn’t believe in the resurrection at all, but even from an orthodox Christian perspective that does. Here, Jesus is saying that the alive-ness of the patriarchs is evidence of the resurrection. Yet traditional Christian theology understands resurrection to be a transformation that is unlocked by Christ’s atoning sacrifice and his own resurrection as “firstborn from the dead” (Colossians 1:18). So what does it mean that people who died before Jesus was born are already alive in the resurrection?
I don’t know. I don’t know what it means. But it does give me a hint that the resurrection is far more wondrous than I ever could have imagined. And, to me, that’s better than a clear-cut, systematic theology of the resurrection. That’s better than a hypothetical scenario that I can point to and feel smart.
Pondering this episode from the Gospel of Luke, I’m realizing that Jesus’ defense of the resurrection of the dead leaves the resurrection more mysterious than before, not less. I’m coming away from this passage knowing both that I do not understand the resurrection at all, but also feeling deeply convinced that the resurrection, whatever it is, is real. And I want to participate in it.
It’s like the Trinity, or the incarnation, or Jesus’ atoning work on the cross. It’s like falling in love, or the way time slows down when there is a crisis, or that feeling you get when you’re out amongst the trees and everything feels connected. The resurrection is a reality that we approach and experience and come to dwell in. The point is to live it.
Deep reality like this can’t be boxed in and summed up with flat, rationalistic explanations. This kind of truth lies outside of our mental models, our hypothetical situations, our partial ways of understanding in this dim present age. The fullness of the resurrection lies, somehow, outside of our four dimensional spacetime.
It’s not that we simply need to learn more, study more, apply ourselves more, so that we can finally explain these mysteries and work out a system to contain them. It seems that we are limited by our very nature as timebound, three dimensional beings. We can only understand so much right now.
For now.
Jesus teaches us that there will be a fuller entrance into this reality. We’ll have a more complete experience of it, just like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob do. But one thing that we are never promised is mastery.
The deep truths of God’s reality aren’t problems to solve. We are so accustomed, in our modern scientific age, to the idea that we can control our environment completely, to get a full accounting of everything. But that’s a myth. It’s an illusion that we cling to, because being out of control is scary. The truth is, we don’t have nearly as much control over the course of human events as we’d like to imagine. Still, we seek it.
We often seek this same kind of control in our encounter with God. You might even say that, to some degree, this is the impetus of all human religion: We want greater understanding and greater control of the spiritual realm. We grope for guarantees and firm rules to follow. We look for structure and discipline. We want to be the ones who tell the stories and craft the hypothetical scenarios.
But the gospel explodes all our attempts at control. The resurrection defies our attempts to make it into a neat and tidy, linear salvation story. To really know this life and power, we must be caught up in it. Immersed in it. Transformed by it.
We can’t stand apart from reality as detached, controlling observers. Along with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we are a part of this resurrection story. We are caught up in it. We must join it and flow with it.
So no more hypothetical scenarios. No more simplistic stories that reduce our creativity. No more human philosophy that commits us to mental models that reduce complexity rather than expanding awareness.
Our God is the God of the living. Let’s be alive and awake in him. Knowing that we don’t know a whole lot, but that we trust in Jesus to guide us where we are lost and give us sight where we are blind. Trusting that in that age that was and is and is to come, we will be altogether transformed. Made new. Made what we were always meant to be. Children of the resurrection.