third Sunday before Advent Remembrance Sunday

Job 19.23-27a; Psalm 17.1-9 (or 17.1-8); 2 Thessalonians 2.1-5,13-end; Luke 20.27-38

SOME questions — rhetorical questions — don’t require answers. Others appear to ask one thing, but actually ask something else. A famous Civil War painting (dating to 1878) by William Frederick Yeames has a matter for its title: And When Did You Last See Your Father? A Roundhead interrogator is effectively asking a Cavalier’s young son, “Where can I find your father, in order that I can arrest him?”

Another query type is the performative, designed to enhance the questioner’s image while discrediting another person (these are common as rats in university seminars). Here, some Sadducees set Jesus a test case: a girl with seven husbands. They ask, “In the resurrection, whose wife will the lady be?”, to show his unsound opinions. It was probably a stock query for opponents. In part, this was class war: one Jewish author remarks, “The Sadducees were wealthy but unpopular; the Pharisees had mass support.”

When street evangelists ask, “Have you met Jesus as your personal friend and saviour?”, they have to listen rigorously to any reply, because it can shape the conversation that follows: they aim to influence. The Sadducees, though, aren’t listening. They want to show Jesus as a Pharisee opponent. They don’t expect to learn anything that can modify their very own views. They aren’t open to persuasion.

Jesus’s teaching here is just not drawn from the Pharisees, who, as opponents of the Sadducees, did consider in a resurrection; neither is it founded on any sacred writings. It emerges purely from his own self. In verses 34-36, he outlines his expectations for the concept of the final resurrection of the dead. Opposing that widespread belief was fundamental to the identity of a Sadducee: they held strictly to what was written within the Law, and nothing more (unlike the Pharisees, Luke 11.42).

This general resurrection is just not directly related to Christian faith as we recognise it — Jesus, the first-fruits of new-covenant resurrection, after whose example those that consider in him will constitute the harvest. Sometimes, the Gospel-writers expose their foreknowledge of events that, inside the Gospel story, remain within the unknown future, as when Jesus tells his disciples to “take up their cross”, at a time when he has not yet undergone crucifixion (Luke 9.23; Matthew 16.24; Mark 8.34). But here there isn’t any predictive reference to the Lord’s resurrection.

In verse 36, he summarises with three points: those that are worthy of a spot within the age to return, and worthy of resurrection (1) cannot die any more, (2) are like angels, and (3) are children of God, which suggests being “children of the resurrection”. Thus, Jesus teaches the Sadducees that they’ve misunderstood what belief in life after this life is all about. We must keep in mind that they’ve asked him this precisely due to their conviction that it’s silly to assume the lifetime of the world to return being similar to this one, through which men and ladies are born, and marry, and die.

Jesus almost agrees with them. His answer to their pseudo-question flips their negative conviction (“there isn’t any resurrection”) right into a positive: they’re right, he says, that the world to return is not going to resemble this one. In that latest way of being (which Christians recognise because the Kingdom of God), there will probably be no more time-bound human institutions akin to marriage, and no more time-driven human experiences, akin to death.

One lesson for us to learn from today’s Gospel may very well be that Jesus doesn’t say to the Sadducees: “Your interpretation of God’s purposes is incorrect: you will have misunderstood resurrection completely.” So often in our disagreements (that are natural and unavoidable in human relationships and our common life), we protect our own beliefs by condemning other people’s. Jesus shows a more excellent way: to say what we expect is correct, seek advice from the Bible when relevant (verse 37), and let truth speak for itself. Jesus’s truth convinces some listeners (Luke tells us that they’re “scribes”): “Teacher, you will have spoken well” (just after the lection, 20.39).

Perhaps the Sadducees and Pharisees hated one another a lot since the difference between them was so small. So, back to that famous painting. Disagreements could make good people do bad things (Luke 21.16). I hope that God would forgive the questioner his interrogation, or forgive the boy, if he lied to guard his father. On Remembrance Sunday, as — looking forward to Advent — on Judgement Day, there may be “a wideness in God’s mercy”.